Forever Young

FOREVER YOUNG
There is a feeling that belongs specifically to being young enough not to know yet what you can't do.
The feeling of dropping into a half-pipe for the first time. Of pushing off on a board that doesn't belong to you yet but already feels like yours. Of a Saturday with nowhere to be and a whole city of concrete and curbs and possibilities that the adult world hasn't yet decided to take from you. Skateboarding was never just a sport — it was a declaration of independence made on four wheels, a subculture that built its own aesthetic, its own music, its own rules, and its own footwear.
The Vans High Top is where that subculture put its flag.
Since 1966, Vans has been making shoes in the particular tradition of Southern California — rubber-soled, canvas-upper, built to grip a board and take the kind of punishment that only someone who falls repeatedly and gets back up can truly inflict on a shoe. The checkerboard. The Sk8-Hi. Worn by everyone from professional skaters to punk bands to every teenager who ever decided that how you dressed was a form of argument.
Forever Young takes all of that and does something no other work in this collection does: it paints directly onto a skate deck.
Both sides. Posca markers, gesso, varnish and handmade coloured cardboard paper building a Vans High Top reimagined in yellow and green — vivid, pattern-covered, the artist's visual language applied to the object that carries the culture's memory. The deck is not a canvas pretending to be a skate deck. It is a skate deck. It has the shape, the weight, the presence of the thing itself — and now it has this on it.
You can hang this on a wall. Or you can remember what it felt like to be young enough to ride it.
Skate deck · Posca markers, gesso, varnish and coloured cardboard on skate deck · 2021 · One of a kind Design on both sides. Signed, titled and dated. Certificate of Authenticity included.