Skate Culture

Unique 1990s Skate Art: the Wonder Twins Skateboards

Rare 1990s Twin Skateboard Art

Tim Brauch and Jason Adams Skate Art

Recently I came across this rare skate art: a pair of decks from Santa Monica Airlines which were produced in 1993, the “Wonder Twins” decks of Tim Brauch and Jason Adams — which, according to Art of Skateboarding, were done by artist Nate Carrico.

Wonder Twins Skate Art
Jason Adams and Tim Brauch Twin Skateboards

(Image credit: Memory Screened)

Memory Screened has a bit of the back-story around the graphic from Jason Adams:

"This wasn’t especially inspired by any existing superhero, it just came from me and Tim Brauch drinking together. We came up with the idea together, we were just always together. Lived together, skated every day, same sponsor, traveled, all that shit! It was the best time, salad days I tell ya…"
Jason Adams Skater Profile
Jason Adams
Skater

I really connect with these decks, particularly in these colorways. The graphics really pop and they represent a particular type of skate art from the 1990’s that I particularly enjoy and connect with: those which, like American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, picked up on the classic illustrative tradition of comic book and comic strip art styles. When I think classic 1990’s skate art, this is the kind of thing I think about.

Skate Art

Where skate art is concerned, I am primarily drawn to and focused on decks from the 1980s and the original Dogtowns from the 1970s.
 
This is in no small part because I was born in the first half of the 70s, and so it was the 80s when I was first drawn into the skate world, and it is that era with which I have the strongest connection to familiarity.
 
That said, I don’t want to understate the fact that, as skate artists go, people like Wes Humpston and Jim Phillips are legends and masters of the craft as well, making their work worthy of attention at any time and in any era.
 
I do not want to mistake my personal familiarities (or nostalgia, if you will) for some sort of objective, universal standard, and I am perfectly open to admitting that plenty of exciting stuff has occurred since those decades.
 
In particular, I have developed a very keen interest in the earlier half of the 1990s — a time which saw legendary skate artists like Marc McKee and Sean Cliver putting out so much iconic and interesting work.
One of the things that I enjoy about skate art is that the volume of work out there seems so prodigious.
 
It’s rather like being an admirer of Picasso. No matter how much you look at his work, you’re constantly amazed that new things frequently turn up that you’ve never seen before — and with skate art, even if you’ve seen a particular piece of deck art before, you’re constantly running into new colorways that can give a completely different spin to a graphic than you’ve seen a thousand times before such as these epic twin decks with the wonder twins, Jason Adams and Tim Brauch.

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