The Peak

Laybourne: All Sorts of RAD

By Adam Cristobal, Arts Editor

Randy Laybourne will be featuring his artwork at the HERE IS NOW pop-up art show on October 24 at 2152 Main Street. For more information, please visit Here- IsNowExhibition.tumblr.com. He will also be curating the Drawing On Vancouver art show on November 19 at the Walrus Shop (3408 Cambie Street).

“I just do a lot of drawing,” Randy Laybourne told The Peak on a typical, drizzling fall evening at a café in Lower Lonsdale. “It’s just constant drawing . . . ever since elementary school, drawing Mr. T comics and trying to replicate Garfield as closely as possible . . . I just kind of sit in my little cave and just draw, and it’s turned into something good.”

Laybourne is a local illustrator, trained graphic artist, art director, and skateboard enthusiast; his aesthetic is down-to-earth and rugged, with more than a hint of West Coast flare. Whilst straddling two passions, art and skateboarding, he has slipped into a skill set that not many people in Vancouver have. “The advertising world is a totally different world [from the skateboarding world] . . . so I can go to companies and help them out, either with graphic design or art direction . . . I can just jump into any project and see how I can affect it.” But drawing and skateboarding aside, Laybourne is a genuinely good guy who has really broken into the world.

“I did two years of community college in Nanaimo and then worked an extra long summer, and I just had to get out, I just had to grow up, in a way,” said Laybourne. “I went to Europe for a whole 12 months with a backpack, a skateboard, and a couple thousand dollars, and ended up working in Greece and going into Turkey, and then actually went through Yugoslavia when the war was on just because the visas were . . . you just didn’t have to pay for them. . . . It’s insane just to realize what was going on just a hundred miles away from where I was when I was on the bus.”

For Laybourne, the skateboard was a lot more than just fun: it was an intercultural vessel that helped him navigate through his travels. “It’s all a universal culture,” he told The Peak. “If you have a skateboard, you basically have friends wherever you go and also it’s kind of a way of meeting people along the way. It’s different — at least back then, it was. There were a lot less skateboarders travelling around. Nowadays, you know, every kid who gets out of high school goes to Barcelona to get footage.”

“It was an amazing adventure. It was like I grew up. I realized I had a Canadian accent,” he added.

Settling down hasn’t been any less hectic for Laybourne. “It’s been a crazy, crazy year; [my wife and I] got married last year and moved out from California and up to Canada . . . We’ve been going back and forth to California for the past year, so we haven’t settled fully, so now we’re here, and it’s rad.”

Vancouver is totally rad, and Laybourne is pretty confident in the city’s art scene. “There’re just a lot of talented people up here like Ben Tour,” he said. “There’s just guys who, what they do is art, they don’t have any other jobs outside of what they’re doing so they’re very focused on creating stuff.” Being small and contained, Vancouver’s art scene is a close-knit community where everyone works to get things started. “What I didn’t really experience down in L.A. and San Diego was a good sense of community. L.A. is a really big commercial art Mecca . . . so I’ve been in art shows here and there, but here in Vancouver it feels like I’m part of something or I’m helping something,” he explained to The Peak. “It’s kind of like, if it’s not happening, create it.”

“I think as soon as my wife and I decided we were going to move to Vancouver, I started drawing mountains, for some reason — it was kind of weird. I kind of got away from drawing mountains after the years of living in California. It was all just rolling hills, in a sense, but then these mountains with snow appeared . . . it was kind of dramatic. That’s kind of what inspired me to organize this Drawing On Vancouver show. This whole show that I’m organizing is just drawings in celebration of Vancouver . . . let’s just do drawings that are fun, and take inspiration from what’s around us.”

“I’m playing the curator [of Drawing On Vancouver] and I’m also putting pieces in the show, so I’m kind of like, right in the middle.”

This week’s upcoming HERE IS NOW art show, however, is a much more spur-of-the-moment endeavour. As a pop-up art show, HERE IS NOW is being produced out of limited time and limited resources for both the artists and organizers. “I think there’s a challenge in just trying to get more stuff done,” Laybourne told The Peak. “I tried to do just a bunch of work that wasn’t sitting and ready, I tried to do just a quick body of work, all fresh these past two weeks. . . . It’s going to be a series of 20 drawings . . . really quick, really fun.”

Laybourne is constantly creating and drawing, which has come in handy for the HERE IS NOW show. He rummaged through his bag and pulled out his sketchbook; I had the privilege to flip through it. Some of these drawings have been scanned and featured on his website, Look Forward to the Past (LookForwardtothePast. com), but to just glance at them for a moment in their raw, pen-on-paper, and original form further lent to the inherent honesty of his art. “[It’s] almost a daily journal that I do,” he explained. “Sometimes they fail, miserably, and I cut them out and throw them away. Sometimes the drawings lead to bigger work or a different body of work. . . . The drawings I’m doing [for the pop-up art show] are tied in with stuff I’ve done in my sketchbook a couple of times. I’m like, ‘Well, I’m going to try this way of doing a drawing just for this show, just kind of like see how it goes, and it turned into a rad little body of work’.”

Laybourne’s artwork is genuine, and like his skateboard in Europe, it works as a bridge between two worlds. Both those versed in art and everyday people can understand and appreciate it, just as both the traveller and the local can hop onto boards and skate through the city together.

“One thing about living in L.A. and seeing a lot of contemporary art and going to a lot of shows is that people just don’t understand that. Unless you have a degree and a master’s in fine arts, you don’t know why this person is doing what they’re doing,” he explained. “But with street artists . . . like Barry McGee, I saw shows in the Hammer Gallery, and I was like, ‘This is the best stuff I’ve seen in my entire life’ . . . street art and skate art just has a level of honesty about it, you don’t need the degree to understand it. But, if you have a degree, maybe you see deeper meanings within the work and you can see the symbolic aspects of it, and you can put your own meanings on it. But an average person, a kid, can see it on a skateboard and be like, ‘Oh, that’s rad, that’s great’.”

He’s still drawing, and we’ll certainly see more from him. “I’ve been lucky in the past few months to be able to . . . just concentrate. Like, the past couple of weeks I’ve spent full days just doing artwork,” he told The Peak. “And I’m tired at the end of the day and can hardly draw, but I’ll still end up sketching here and there. It’s a job, but it’s such an honour to do it.”

In the end, though, it’s an honour to have Laybourne here.