Jaco Haasbroek Interview

November 2, 2013 9:12 am Published by weareverb

Acrylic & Ink on Paper. 148.5 mm x 210 mm.

Jaco Haasbroek is an artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is also one of the artists who did a deck graphic for the new Verb Artists Series 2013 range, which will be here soon. We caught up with him to chat about his graphic and what went into it…

What made you decide to take on this project?

I’ve always wanted to design a skateboard graphic.

Name 1 thing you’ve lost and 1 thing you’ve found, worth mentioning.

As a kid I once picked up R20 at a fair and was really happy about it, thinking that I now had R40 to spend, only to realise that I had lost my R20.

Tell us more about your artwork. Why did you decide to do what you did? What is the story behind it?

I was thinking about the word ‘nowhere’ and how, when broken into two, it becomes ‘now’ & ‘here’. So it represents both being lost and found. I then applied this to the old saying “I’m in the middle of nowhere” which, when stated, is both a declaration of being lost, but also establishes a specific location – if that makes any sense. I then just turned the ‘H’ into a character, seeing as he is literally in the middle of nowhere.

You do understand that, through the execution of your artwork onto the bottom of a skateboard deck, most of the replicas of your artwork will be thrown around, and get scratched and broken in the street right? How does that make you feel?

I don’t mind. If people want to keep the artwork in tact they can hang it on a wall. It is, after all, a functional object and there’s something great about the artwork changing as it gets used.

Doing a graphic to be applied onto a skateboard deck is essentially just creating an artwork for a different size and shape canvas than normal. What excites you about the idea that your artwork is going to feature on a deck as opposed to doing a regular print?

It lends itself well to being a flat surface to print on, but also has some slight curves and this makes it sculptural. It seems to become an art object, as apposed to just another print.

Name 5 verbs that describe your process when you were creating your graphic.

Think. Sketch. Trace. Colour. Save.