Jade Klara Interview

October 2, 2013 9:01 am Published by weareverb

Jade Klara is an artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. She 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 her to chat about her graphic and what went into it…

What made you decide to take on this project?

I had a board when I was 8; an old 80’s shape with a bright pink mutant rat graphic. I was in love. I have always wanted to do a skate graphic.

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

I once found a 5 leaf clover, but I was very young and bad at maths so you never know. I lose my brushes all the time but I find them holding my hair up.

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

When I thought of lost & found I thought of ancient treasure, of heaps of gold and rubies hiding in an undiscovered cave. I was then really intrigued by a genie’s lamp, but instead of a typical genie I wanted something more animalistic, so the wolf genie was born. I kept the scene quite dark and ghostly and then used metallic gold as a reference to lost treasure and magic.

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 like that it has a lifespan. Ephemeral things are more poetic.

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’s great that this canvas has a purpose. It gets to move and break and see the world.

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

Growl, draw, make-a-wolf-face-for-reference, draw, exhale.