Art and sports are like cats and dogs. In school you have the preppy jocks versus the weird artsy kids; girls either fall for the captain of the soccer team or the lead singer of the local garage band, and Taylor Swift longs for the guy whose girlfriend is cheer captain while she’s listening to the kind of music the girlfriend doesn’t like. Of course, this is a slightly clichéd view (anyone remember She’s All That?), but it is true that art and sports generally attract different kinds of people with different lifestyles. But why this pick-and-choose mentality when you could have it all? After all, both art and sports are simply ways to enhance the way we experience things, just through different means.
A model of a successful hybrid of the two is the longboard company Longboard Living, owned by Ryan Rubin and located in Kensington Market. Occupying the basement of a residential house, the shop/gallery operates as an active resource for Toronto’s longboarding community, as well as supporting and driving the local arts scene by featuring artwork on the boards. The company was founded in 2008, and the idea to commission local artists to paint on the boards was born of necessity. “Not having a large capital investment to have boards printed in a factory, I was able to reach out to some of the artists who were displaying their work along the streets in Toronto,” says Rubin. “For example, Mike Parsons [a.k.a Heyapathy] is well known for displaying his work on Queen West. I wanted the art on my boards to reflect the city and the artists within it, rather than the traditional West Coast, California surf longboard that often has images of palm trees and waves, which are great but just not relevant to the environment that we are using to skate and surf.”
Artists were soon found and approached. “The fact that we were a small independent company with low start-up capital, reaching out to artists and developing a collaborative relationship is what allowed us to work with them and upon the sale of the board we would then share profits,” Rubin continues. “From there we basically just reached out to any artist who was interested in the project. Longboard Living would provide a board that was locally made by an independent builder and the artist would paint it. Through that we built our sort of roster of artists and then we began to do shows at galleries, displaying the artwork.”
The concept makes sense considering the time and place in which we live. Unlike skateboarding, longboarding is not about doing all kinds of crazy tricks, but is rather a mode of transportation for surfing the streets. In a city where space is a diminishing commodity, and where transportation is getting increasingly expensive and crammed, longboards cater to the growing demand for an environmentally friendly lifestyle. At the same time, the yearning for individuality with style has never been greater; the longboard as canvas is, as Rubin says, an exciting new medium for artists to explore. By featuring commissioned artwork on the boards that is highly embedded in its cultural sphere, the demand for individuality, uniqueness, and style is visualized and transported into daily life.
In its beginnings, when Longboard Living only served as a provider for customized boards and did not have its own shop/gallery, the response to the focus on the artwork was mixed. “There was a pretty large difference between the response we got from the current longboarding community, which is less interested in customized graphics on the bottom of the board,” says Rubin. “What is more important to them is the shape of the board, how it responds, and the kinds of things you can do with it rather than how it looks, so less of an accessory and more of a tool for doing gnarly stuff.”
However, adds Rubin, “When starting the company my goal was to reach out to new riders who didn’t have a longboard, didn’t know about any of the products or any of the brands involved and become a source for people that weren’t currently involved in the community.” This turned out to be the right approach; there was a big demand, which allowed Longboard Living to move into its current location at 74 Oxford St. in March, 2010.
“The shop opened up a lot of new doors for us. It allowed us to expand into a longboard-specific skateshop, which otherwise the city does not currently have. It also allowed us to have our own in-house gallery for all the artwork that we had and to open up the shop as a canvas itself. The floor, the walls and the entrance have all been painted by different artists who have done boards for us. Again, there’s an opportunity for us to help promote the artists and it adds a lot of good character and vibe to the space.”
It is true that the scope has expanded. While the distinctive feature of Longboard Living remains the artwork on the boards and the promotion of local artists, they also offer weekly group rides through the city, as well as free longboarding lessons, welcoming all ages and levels of experience. Through this holistic approach to the sport the company has fostered a community that, before, did not exist in this way. The name Longboard Living is descriptive of the company’s philosophy, making longboarding more than a sport, but a lifestyle. By including artwork that is so much based on locality and individuality stemming from the streets of Toronto, the longboarding experience is captured and channelled in a creative way that creates accessibility to more than just riders. To most longboarders the sport is an integral part of their daily life; riding to class, to the subway, or just for recreational purposes. With the graphics on the bottom, the gallery expands throughout the whole city, and the art it features is carried out into the world it was inspired by. “We would like to continue to build bridges and networks for Toronto`s large artist groups or surplus of emerging artists. We would like to continue to find jobs for them in this fast-growing industry of longboarding.”
