ARTIST INTERVIEW: MARK MAGGIORI
Billy Meiners: Where did you grow up?
Mark Maggiori: I grew up in France in a small town called Fontainebleau. Yeah it’s a big forest and it’s like an hour south of Paris. It’s interesting because it was a very big skateboard community when I was a kid there. It was kinda like the first main pool for skateboard. We had a big half pipe and that’s how I started skating when I was 8.
BM: Ok, because my next question was gonna be what kind of background do you have with skating.
MM: Well yeah it’s pretty big because I skated pretty much my whole life. I stopped skating hardcore around when I was 15 because from like 8 to 15 I really skateboarded every day. It was no fear. And then after 15 I started playing guitar and started to be more cautious about, “I don’t to break my hands.” You know I started to be more careful about all that. And now I’m in my adult age and I’m definitely very scared of injury but that’s why I’ve been mostly skating halfpipes because I feel more comfortable just carving around and doing just a couple of tricks. I’ve ever been a crazy aerial guy unfortunately but I just enjoy skating. I would just go to the grocery store on skateboard and come back downhill just like fucking loving it. Just doing simple things. I have so many boards at home back in France. I just brought one here but I have so many out there I wish I could do a trip where I can actually bring some back. Because I collected them my whole life. And I don’t even know where they all are.
BM: What was it like skating in France? How was the scene? Because now you’re in California and it’s the birthplace of it but you started skating out in France.
MM: Well the funny thing like I said there was this skateboard club when I was a kid in my hometown because I guess one of the guys was traveling the world and he kind of discovered skateboard. I’m talking 1985/86 so yeah it was really the beginning. There was still slalom and shit like that. And he brought that back to France and us kids in this town started to go and check out what was going on. In 1987 they did a contest that was called the Open Air and they invited the Bones Brigade so all the guys from Powell Peralta came and it was awesome! There was Steve Caballero and Lester Kasai and Christian Hosoi. It was so good… I was like 9 and my parents were buying me the VHS “Wheels On Fire” ll the Santa Cruz videos. So that’s what I grew up with was dreaming of California. Just skating. It was forbidden to skate on the sidewalk where I was so I sometimes got stopped by the cops and brought to the cop station or whatever you call it and they would call my parents to come pick me up and say “What’d you do!?” but we were just skating you know! But it was cool because it kept me out of trouble for my whole life because when you are 13 and some kids start to fuck up but you don’t because I was just skating and I just wanted to be good at skateboarding. And I would never join the crew of downsider [laughs]. It was always positive. You gotta skate every day. That was the thing
BM: So then when was your first time in the US?
MM: When I was 15 my uncle brought me here for the first time with my cousin and we did a cross-country road trip from New York to San Francisco. It was amazing and so that was when I discovered the West and all the amazing landscapes like Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. But also my main goal was to go to San Francisco to go to the Vans store and I bought a bunch of Airwalks back then from this warehouse [laughs]. And when I came back to San Francisco when I was like 35 I was looking for that spot that we went out with my uncle and kinda dreaming about it but and never been able to find it again. It was on the docks somewhere in San Francisco but it was in 1992 so of course the thing got closed probably. But I just remember so many shoes on the wall and all the kinds of Airwalks and Vision Streetwear that didn’t have back in France. I didn’t even know what to chose [laughs]! I had my budget and you know back then I could only get one pair. But it was awesome and I bought a skate deck too. It was cool man…
BM: At what point did you decide to start studying art and practicing art seriously?
MM: Well after graduation from high school when I was 18 I didn’t really know what to do apart from music. I just wanted to keep playing in my band and my parents didn’t really like that idea so I went to University for studying history. Just like classic history and I did a month and I was like, “I don’t like that.” That’s not my crew, that’s not my crowd, that’s not my people. I don’t belong to that shit. So I stopped and then I just played music for a few months and then my uncle (the same guy that brought me to America) suggested I should maybe study art since I was in music and liked graphics and stuff because I was always interested in graphics because of skateboarding (all the graphics on the decks). So I went to that art school in Paris. That’s one of the amazing art schools that’s been there since the late 19th century. Very classic art studies and I fucking loved it. And then from there I just started snowballing into it.
BM: Who would you say are a few artists that have influenced you?
MM: Well there’s a lot in different fields and that’s the thing because I studied photography and film for a while and storyboard and all that. So there’s photographers but mainly in painting the first really striking thing was John Singer Sargent. It was his portraits and the way he was painting when I discovered him. It was really late; I was probably 21 when I discovered Sargent. But it was my first time to really stare at paintings in details and then from Sargent I discovered Sorolla (Joaquin Sorolla, he’s a Spanish painter). And then this whole post-impressionism scene that was active in the 1900’s in Europe. Very few knowledge of American art actually back then but then when I came to America and discovered western art and it really got me strong. I really enjoyed discovering Remington and Frank Johnson and all those pioneer painters from America and then I realized there’s so much things that happened here in the early 20th century (like 1900-1930). There was so many great artist like Maynard Dixon and Edgar Payne and all those guys. So I not going to say that I got influenced by them because it was too late in my life when I discovered them. Because usually you are influenced when you are really young so I would say they definitely inspired me to do that for sure. I would say Normal Rockwell too because he’s a classic but man he was so good [laughs].
BM: So then what prompted you to move to the US?
MM: I think it was a lifetime dream like I was saying from 8 years old. Skateboard, California, the Z-boys, all that really… I just wanted to be a part of that when I was a kid but I couldn’t so it was a dream that grew up in me and a desire to come here. And then the landscapes and the possibility that felt like in America, still, things can happen more than in France. France is different for that and what’s going on in painting for me right now wouldn’t have been possible in France.
