This past November I ran into Marty Jimenez at the preview opening of the Skateboard: Evolution & Art in California exhibition in Santa Monica, CA. Now unfortunately for Marty, he knows that every single time I run into him I'm going to ask if he's unearthed his board collection yet. It was, after all, one of the few I never managed to document despite badgering him to no end over the course of putting both Disposable books together. He has a reason—a very good one at that—for not letting me have a photographic crack at his archives, and even though I have no plans for any future books I'm still curious as to what he may have squirreled away during his time at the epicenter of Orange County skateboard production in the '80s.
God help me but shit like this keeps me up late at night.
Anyway, Marty apologized once again for not being able to spring his boards in a timely manner (in a referential way they really are the equivalent to James Cameron's ridiculously named "Unobtanium" from Avatar, tree of life and all), but then went on to say that he had recently stumbled upon something of interest in his art archives: a Xerox copy of what appeared to be the inspiration behind Mark Gonzales's original pro model graphic on Vision by Andy Takakjian. I said I was definitely interested in seeing this and, lo and behold, just the other day a shot of it finally appeared in my inbox from Marty.
Immediately after receiving the image I zipped it on over to Andy—whom I finally had the chance to meet for the first time several months ago when he showed up out of the blue at a book release party for The Disposable Skateboard Bible held at the HUF store in Los Angeles—to see if he could shed some historical light on its background.
"Wow, there's a relic from the ark of the unknown martyr!" he wrote back, "Yeah, that would be a phase of genesis, as I loosely recall that was a sort of prelim for a cheesy little self promotional postcard series I ran off back in 1985. I believe it was an amalgam of linoleum cut and Zip-A-Tone scraps. I didn't get any particular direction from Vision, so I used it to fill space on the Gonz deck in between the 'Vision' and 'Mark Gonzales' names. Of course it required some 'editing' to fill the deck space correctly.
"I had no idea anyone would like it in any way. I thought it would be a genuine reject and I would have to think up something else. In fact, I really just tossed it together to be something to show 'til I could think of something better. With the lack of direction given I reckoned I would be groping through quite a few generations 'til something clicked. Well, as they say, who knew?! It was a one hit wonder!"
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