In the Arctic fall / autumn of 2021, I decided to paint my skis.
I’m using Volkl’s One hundred 8 planks, a wide fully rockered beast of a ski with a classy minimalist paint job. I really like this look, its simple, they’re skis, they don’t need to be anything else. One day, with my pre-teen sons, it got to be artwork day with paint markers – so the skis became a canvas!
I started with a mountain scene – obviously – on the ski tails. It had some design challenges. First, color range limits – I wanted to use as few colors as possible. Next, I wanted it to be ski-side-agnostic. That is, the design should still work if I swap skis between feet.
All this was really fun, and made some nice ski art. So what is the ephemeral aspect of this?
Paint markers are robust, but wear off. Skis get beaten up as we use them. I decided to never touch the artwork up, and see how long it would last through the season. And a little project was born to document how the art degraded over skiing time. It was done on the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is long gone. I’ve added a gallery here:
By the end of the skiing season, well, there was not much left. So the skis were cleaned, and in 2022 a new artwork was completed for the new skiing season in Tromsø!
This one is a design departure, it does not work so well if I swap my skis over. It is also a slight departure from the movement, in that there is both a pencil on paper and acrylic-on-canvas version – not very impermanent, although a nice campfire can always fix that.
It’s kind of a pointless project right? Yes and no… it is definitely motivation to ski better! The less my skis cross, the longer the paintwork lasts. And fun is not without value in itself.
There was also a deeper mindset…
Ephemeral art as a movement
A driver for making this work was that at the time, it was at the peak of an NFT bubble. While this has thankfully died (at the cost of a lot of resources), as a society we are increasingly stuck on the idea of immutability. We want things to be permanent / fixed / unchanging.
We are also stuck looking back, to dead artists (and others) from hundreds of years ago, abusing their memory by trading their work as trinkets for the wealthy. It is not a healthy system – it is not inspiring at all to create persistent artwork knowing that someone so far removed from my current space and time could potentially generate far more profit from my labour than I ever will in my life.
Yes, art is about giving, sharing, caring – so I will not stop making art. And I see the motivation I just wrote about as extremely selfish. I want to bring you all joy, to spark your own creativity! One way to meet all my philosophical needs is to make art that is used, and goes away. I think it is an important act – to create for the present, and be able to let it go. I see this in street art culture – artists use walls as their canvas, and who knows how long their work stays before being painted over by the next generation! I know there’s a lot of ego and politics in street art culture, looking above and beyond that, the core premise – that letting go, the celebration of impermanence and evolution -is a wonderful ethic.
Environmental impact
Making something which is destined to degrade has impact. Where do the little paint flecks go when they are scratched off? What do they do in the environment? What are they made of?
For these works I’m using Uni POSCA markers, which contain a water based acrylic paint. So yes, I am leaving a trail of little microplastic particles in the snowpack, which end up in the water cycle and in the ocean. I am conflicted about this, as you can read I did it anyway – so I am also massively hypocritical. Is it a drop in the ocean of microplastics from the ski industry, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the shipping and oil industries? Yes.
It is also a drop I have control over, and responsibility for.
Since early 2023 my skis have sat in a shed most of the time – the Australian work climate has not been forgiving, and skiing – even backcountry adventures costing only food and fuel, are off the table for now. So the 2022/23 season design is still going strong! If it wears out, the next iteration I hope to find some more friendly media. Suggestions are welcome!
Supporting the ephemeral art project
I know, I know. This next part kind of breaks that whole chain of ephemerality. I created a digital version of the 2022/23 design and made it a product you can buy from print on demand suppliers. I got this super nice hoody, which has held up well. It was also a fun project to try and digitize the work and keep that ‘I drew this freehand with paint markers’ feel.
Currently the design can be put on things at Redbubble: https://adamsteer.redbubble.com
…although this hoodie came from Printful, and I think I’ll go back to using them, once I rejig all the self hosted web shop parts. As always, the donation block below is a great way to just support these hopefully fun stories about interesting things.
And I am really happy to hear from production partners – the idea of screenprinting these by hand for more durable works has also been on my mind.
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