When did you start skating?
I started skateboarding in the summer of 1996. I was twelve years old. My childhood best friend went on vacation to California, and he came back really interested in skateboarding. It wasn’t long before we were messing around in his driveway on skateboards.
What was your first skateboard?
My aforementioned childhood friend gave me his old setup when he got a new one. It was a cheap toy store brand and if I remember correctly, I don’t think it even had griptape on it. Instead, there was some coarse grit adhered to the top of the board, which was painted black. I learned how to ollie on it, and then some friends insisted I take a third-hand Flip deck from them. I swapped it out and didn’t look back.
When did you stop or slow down significantly?
I still skate today. Since the last half of my twenties, I don’t get on my board as much as I did when I was a teenager, but it’s still something I absolutely make time for. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.
What do you do for a living?
I’m an illustrator and poster artist. Most of my work is screen printed, but I also paint and draw quite a bit. Much of the work I do is for bands: concert posters, album art, etc. But I have also done artwork for beer labels, skateboard decks, book covers, and t shirts.
When you are not skating, how often do you think about skateboarding?
At least once a day. I think it’s impossible to live in a big city and not be reminded of it. Urban architecture is full of cues to fantasize about skating, between the planters and benches to low rails and barriers and every parking block in between.
I’ve traveled quite a bit for work, as well as a bit with my band, and every time I end up in a new city, I can’t help but examine the landscape through the eyes of a skateboarder. It’s even better when I have my board with me and a free hour or two to go explore!
How did skateboarding affect the direction of your life?
Skateboarding completely altered the course of my life. I think when I was twelve, I was pretty lost. I was kind of getting interested in punk rock, but I really didn’t understand it and hadn’t taken the plunge just yet. I spent a lot of my childhood wondering why I wasn’t any good at sports, and just never really satisfying this part of myself that I didn’t even know existed. Skateboarding was an outlet for that part of me. I didn’t know that’s what was going on when I was building sketchy ramps in my parents’ garage and running from cops for the first time or staring at skate catalogs in school all day, but I think the reason I was so taken with it was because it just made sense to me on a deeply personal and intellectual level.
With skateboarding came a proper introduction to punk rock. Both skating and punk are (were) about creating something in the margins of a culture. They’re about making a new scene for those who were looking for something else and perhaps didn’t even realize it. I think the general principles associated with DIY ethics–like those that made skateboarding what it is today–have shaped a lot of the big decisions I have made in life, as well as tightly held political and philosophical beliefs. Some of my best friends to this day are people I used to skate with in grade school and high school.
What is the connection between skateboarding and creativity?
Creativity is possibly the most important part of skateboarding. For someone to take apart old roller-skates and affix them to a piece of wood several decades ago, to take a skateboard into an empty swimming pool for the first time, to continuously challenge the limits of what we thought was possible on a skateboard, for people to take bags of concrete into the night and make new skate spots, for people to start companies and launch careers in skateboarding as filmers, designers, photographers, and editors–these are all inherently creative endeavors. Skateboarding changes the way we see the world. Skateboarders are constantly taking ordinary objects and repurposing them, inventing new tricks, and both envisioning and actualizing things others would never have thought possible. I think the connection between skateboarding and creativity cannot be overstated by anyone who has ever spent time on a board.
More about Justin Santora
Justin Santora.com, A Letter of Resignation (blog)
Connect with Justin Santora
Skate Photo #1: Backside tailslide in Chicago, IL. June 2013. Photo by Aaron Ehinger
Skate Photo #2: Backside tailslide in Lockport, IL. Sept. 2010. Photo by Joel McGregor