There's a video on YouTube of pro skateboarder Chris "Cookie" Colbourn, riding his board down a rock face and across a road to jump an electric fence and fall into a field of unperturbed cows. He has performed greater tricks, but this one has the same blend of absurdity, daring and sweetness that can be seen in "Primarily Flowers," Colbourn's solo show of paintings currently on view at Safe and Sound Gallery in Burlington. The Queen City skater is temporarily back from San Diego and recently purchased a home in Bristol.
Colbourn's cast of characters includes blue people, fat-headed cartoons, monsters with eyeballs on stalks and one-eyed creatures. There are some experiments with spray-painting and, as the show's title suggests, imagery of flowers — some of which sprout eyeballs. Colbourn may not be referencing Saint Lucia, who in Renaissance paintings sometimes holds a flower that grows her own eyes, but then again, she is pretty badass, and Colbourn seems to find inspiration everywhere.
Colbourn and Safe and Sound curator Marin Horikawa have created asymmetrical groupings on the wall, including canvases, framed works and paintings on skateboard decks. The works aren't refined or polished — many are on reused canvases from thrift stores and dumpsters — but they show a clearly established visual language. They're totally of a piece with skater culture and its capacity for being simultaneously antiestablishment and completely branded.
In that vein, Colbourn collaborated with Foam Brewers on a beer whose label features a blue monster from one of his paintings in the show. The beer and painting are both called "Primarily Hazy."
Professional skateboards feature graphics, and Colbourn now often designs his own. Given that, on a bad day, a skateboard might last only one run before it breaks, Colbourn has had plenty of chances to display his creativity. That's also why some of the paintings are on used boards; he's giving them another life, stickers and all. On others, Colbourn's paintings are etched into the maple surface with a laser cutter, the picture emerging from layers of scraped paint.
The layered effect works differently, and successfully, in "Mixed media melody." Here, Colbourn has partially painted over a found painting, leaving the original border and signature visible. Red and white squares and a spray-painted leaf create compositional structure, while tiny cartoon details articulate little scenes: someone playing a guitar, a creature opening its mouth to engulf another mini-painting. Colbourn's thought process is openly improvisational and unafraid.
"Skateboarding is kind of like painting," Horikawa said. "You kind of try to express who you are."
That's evident throughout the show. Along with his monsters, Colbourn displays a few observational works, such as the lovely watercolor-and-ink "Mason Jar," a floral still life displayed in a frame he also made. For someone with an established visual brand, that's like doing a curb-tailslide-to-transfer-to-switch-crooked-grind-to-fakie-manual-to-fakie-flip-out.
"I think drawing flowers took a lot of courage," Colbourn said. "Being OK with them not being perfect and still putting them on a wall took a lot of courage."