Words: Anna Langer

While the season is coming to an end, the last Art page is dedicated to a topic that is ongoing: the fight against cancer. Globally it was one of the leading cause of death in 2010. Breast cancer, is a disease that many ranked snowboard girls have had to deal with. Amongst them Tina Basich and Shannon Dunn, who founded the charity Boarding For Breast Cancer after their friend Monica Steward died from the disease aged 28.

The organizations original mandate was to organise events that would increase awareness for breast cancer and raise money for the fi ght against it, but the foundation has spread their wings and now manages campaigns for the cause, including educational tours in universities, learning retreats, informative videos concerning the disease and their events and collaborations with brands from the boardsport scene.

One of their biggest initiatives is their artist’s collaboration with Sessions, which is now in its fourth year this winter. These collaborations are a more tangible and accessible approach to the topic of cancer for the majority of us.

Rather than labouring the dark side of the disease Sweden based French artist Amanda Mendiant instead focused on B4BC’s campaign “Know Yourself: Early Detection + Active Lifestyle = Best Prevention” and the message she wanted to get across, was to ‘Protect your Breasts’. “When I thought of how to visually illustrate this, the obvious came to me: what’s the refl ex when you want to protect a part of your body? To cover or hold it. Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest and the best way to communicate! And so I designed the fi rst jacket with a girl on the back that is reaching out to the front to hold and protect the owner of the jacket’s breasts.”

Based on this original idea, which was used for the first collaborations, Amanda created another unique artwork for Sessions and B4BC, that was auctioned off during the Breast Cancer Awareness Month, in September 2010, with all proceeds going towards the charity. “This years design is a strong lady with an attitude. I didn’t want to cover her with clothes since breasts still are the main reason for the campaign, so she is covering, protecting her breasts herself. And for a lack of red nipples I painted two cherries!”

As her “feminine yet slightly edgy but always fashionable graphics,” as Session’s marketing manager Daniell Glagola describes Amanda’s style, work so well to bring the massage across point blank, there will be another collaboration with her in the upcoming 2011/12 season. Most graphics in snowboarding are purely there as eye candy and yet with the work of B4BC there is a much greater impact on the hearts and minds of those looking
at it. So we dearly hope there will be more alliances between the good causes, snowboarding and fine arts in the future, that will stimulate hearts and minds!

sessions.com

WORDS: ANNA LANGER

While we’ve focused on the art used for snowboard graphics in previous issues, we decided to shake things up a bit at the peak of the season to
tell you the skinny on the Pirates Movie Productions Art Book.

Every crew has at least one ‘art-fag’, scribbling and sketching wherever they go and on anything they pass. This phenomenon is not a rare one in the sideways moving scene. “Snowboarding and art are related” explains Pirates Art Captain, Tobias “Ludschi” Ludescher. “When you’re snowboarding or drawing you’re in the same mindset – you don’t think, you just do.”

Ludschi knows what he’s talking about as he belongs to that mindset himself – as well as photography he used to do board graphics – and had his first work published in Onboard ten years ago. Four years later, together with fellow shredhead and Pirate Gigi Rüf, he had the idea to create a little art magazine to distribute amongst their friends. They then had the idea it might actually interest a lot more people and so they spontaneously decided that instead of stapling the collages together by hand as originally planned, it would be a nice idea to integrate it into the Pirate Movie Productions’ DVD and spread the love among all the pirates in the big shred sea.

While it was mainly works of Ludschi and Gigi in the fi rst Art Book, they involved more and more people over the following years, be it riders like Prince of Darkness Danny Larsen (who’s first contribution were “a bunch of weird drawings on an old greasy Pizza carton,” says Ludschi remembering his surprise), design collective Papriko that are living and working in Tokyo, artist Claudia Marclay, snowboard über snapper Blotto and many more. This colourful collection of different styles, backgrounds, and techniques accounts for the Art Book’s unique look.

Particularly unique is also the way the sponsoring brands are integrated into the book. Instead of using regular ads, the riders specially create a page for their sponsor that range from a simple shot of them with some doodles (Ludschi’s “signature” design) to delicate drawings from Danny Larsen and Marco Feichter for K2 and Ride.

For those more deeply involved, Ludschi organised something special in the preparation for Hooked: the Isolation Camp. “It was an old idea of mine to do a creative camp and so this summer we invited a bunch of musicians and artist buddies to my hometown in the Vorarlberg to spend a week cut off from the real world to be productive together, jam, draw and have a good time,” he remembers. Being in such a creative environment is something all of the participants deeply enjoyed and used productively.

“In skateboarding the connection between art and board riding is still a lot more obvious. It got a bit lost in snowboarding, and with the Art Book I’m trying to push and bring it back a bit,” was how Ludschi summed it up: And from Onboard’s perspective he is succeeding. If you’re interested to see more of the Pirates artwork, check their blog for the next exhibition. They have already had shows in Barcelona, Paris, Moscow and Vienna.

For details check out the Pirate Movie Production website.