Ugly People Series

Ugly People – Painted Skate Deck Series

The Ugly People series came out of a moment when my painting style shifted and I decided to push old materials into something new. I had leftover vinyl-printed decks from my earlier E-Girl run that weren’t selling, so I bought bottles of nail polish remover from King Soopers and stripped the graphics off myself in my brother’s attic.

The remover left behind a strange, concrete-like texture and pattern across the surface of each deck. In the center, I painted a square filled with handwritten text and subtle imagery, giving each board its own rough but intentional look. The smell of remover stayed in that attic long after I moved to Tokyo — even when I visited a year ago, it still lingered.

Ugly People was one of the harder series to sell, landing after Eat Paint and Nothing Club, but it carried a raw energy that reflected that transition period. These decks marked a point where I started breaking my own process apart, reshaping older work into something different.