Revisit: The Brian Lotti Interview

This interview with brian lotti originally appeared in monster children issue #43, which was released in 2015.

The artist Brian Lotti is a maverick. He’s a square peg in a round hole, a misfit, a curiosity; Brian Lotti is a skater… who paints landscapes.

Now, we know that just because he skates doesn’t mean he’s incapable of producing beautiful landscape paintings, but when was the last time you saw Claus Grabke on a hillock wearing a smock and one of those poomfy painter hats? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw Claus Grabke? I hope he’s okay.

Brian, though, he gets out there with his easel and his paints and he captures the colours and the shapes and the feeling of a place as he experiences it. He’s very good, Brian, and I rang him up to tell him so.

I don’t wanna get stuck on skate, but you, Brian, invented the Bigspin. Why didn’t you secure your legacy and name it ‘The Brian’ or something like that?

Oh gosh…

I don’t want to blow smoke up your arse, but you were hugely influential in skateboarding.

Well, a little bit, I guess, in hindsight. But there were a lot of guys skating, and they were playing around with the same things: trying to adapt tricks to curbs and benches, and then on handrails, you know—a lot of people were getting freaky at the same time. But the Bigspin thing was kind of a joke. I was skating for H-Street at the time, and I was just doing this little thing—it was like a backside 180 and you turned the board another 180, so it’s like an Impossible, or whatever. And at the time, in California, the lottery was really big, and every Saturday they’d have a thing on TV called The Big Spin.

The Big Spin was a lottery?

Yeah. And Alphonzo Rawls, who also skated for H-Street at the time, would be like, ‘Oh, you’re doing a Big Spin! It’s the Big Spin!’ And he used to fuck around and call me ‘Lottery’ because my name’s Lotti.

So that trick could’ve easily ended up being called the Mega Millions.

Yeah! He came up with that name though, and kept rattling it off.

And it stuck.

It stuck.

Being on H-Street must’ve been pretty cool, turning the industry / Big Skate on its head. You were in Hokus Pokus, right? I can’t remember shit from before 1990.

Yeah, yeah, I had a part in that. That was the beginning—Matt Hensley and everything. He was so good.

I remember seeing Hokus Pokus when it came out and thinking, ‘What is this?’ It was so raw and DIY.

Yeah.

I actually didn’t like it at first.

Really?

Yeah, but then the penny dropped and I was like, ‘Fuck! Wait! These kids are doing it themselves!’ I was so psyched!

That was it! That was the beginning of ‘It’s all right, anyone can do this’; that crappy little spot at the end of you street, that bench—go and get some, you know?

Yeah. It was hugely inspiring. When was the last time you saw Matt Hensley?

Man, I think I saw him about a year ago. There was an art show and he came up for that. He’s super rad.

What would you be doing if you’d somehow never discovered skateboarding?

That’s a good question.

You started quite young, right—like, twelve or thirteen?

Yeah, yeah, twelve or thirteen. Exactly.

What do you think you’d be doing?

Fuck. Well, in school I was always into art. I cut class in high school to go hang out in the art room and make ceramics and crap. At the school I went to, the kids were really mean, so I didn’t like to go to lunch with people. But I don’t know, that’s a good question…

It’s a pretty stupid question really. Like, how would you know where your life was headed when you were twelve?

No man, it’s a good question.

Do you think you would’ve ended up in the military or something?

Well, my dad was in the military.

Military dad. Did he want you to join the army?

No, no. He was super cool. He was in the air force so he wouldn’t be on the ground during the Vietnam War. He got drafted and he flew planes. I think he ended up really falling in love with it—getting hooked on it like a surfer or something.

Yeah?

Yeah, he was really into flying. And he was always really supportive. I think he would’ve been stoked on whatever [I did], but I probably wouldn’t have got into skating as much as I did had he not passed away. He got in a plane crash, and I remember when that happened it really got me into skateboarding. I was living in Las Vegas and I had all these friends who were skating too, and there were really good ditches there… My dad was a big part of my life, and when he passed, it really galvanised it for me. I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a skater now. Fuck it.’

And now you’re an artist.

Yeah.

I want to say you’re an impressionist.

Well, yeah, I think I’ve had this impressionist rooting, I guess, studying colour and light. I think colour—even more than light—is a really big interest… And gradients too: the way a sky changes, you know? It’ll get deeper and darker higher up, and then become lighter below.

Vignettes, we’re talking about.

Yeah, yeah. Totally. That’s really interesting [to me].

Your work kinda reminds me of Jeffrey Smart’s work, only it’s warmer and… and sort of different.

Oh yeah? I don’t know Jeffrey Smart; let me check him out.

Are you googling him right now?

Yeah.

I mean, he’s totally different to you, but I think the way you’ll have a figure alone in a landscape…

Right, right.

You’re looking at his work right now.

Yeah.

And you’re shaking your head and wondering what the fuck I’m talking about.

No, not at all. His stuff is really interesting; it kind of makes me think of de Chirico too.

Who?

Giorgio de Chirico. He was a surrealist.

Was he cool?

Yeah, he was cool.

What painters do you get compared to?

There’s this Californian painter named Richard Diebenkorn, and people have said some of my stuff reminds them of his work.

Do you go outside and paint?

Yeah, I used to do a lot of plein air painting, landscape painting and stuff—and now it’s been fun to work on figure paintings and work in the studio, and kind of go bigger, whip in little narratives, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, people cruising into the landscape and stuff; I’ve been on a tear with figures and landscapes. I’m working on a series of bigger paintings, and by bigger I mean, like, three feet by four feet, four feet by five feet—not super, super big, but bigger. And the work is getting looser and more painterly and more about colour, less about… less of an illustration and more about playing with colour.

Did you return to school to study art?

Yeah.

And you sort of drifted off the skate radar. What happened?

Well, it seemed like I kept getting hurt for a year straight. I was skating for Blind at the time, and I was trying to film a video part and I kept getting hurt over and over, until finally I dislocated my shoulder and I was like, ‘Fuck this,’ you know? I was really frustrated. Anyway, I bought some paints and threw myself into painting.

And then you went back to school to study?

Yeah. I did enough paintings, and I was having fun with that, and I was taking photos too. And I just thought, ‘Fuck, why don’t I go back to school and really go for it, see if I can make a shift?’ Which I’m still working on, man, like, twenty-five years later.

Oh, so you weren’t a mature age student.

No, No. I was, like, twenty-one.

What’s your workday like—what do you do? Do you get out of bed and start painting, or… Take me through a day.

Oh man, I guess it depends on what I’ve got to do. Like, today I met up with a friend in Malibu and we did some plein air painting around his place, some different views of the ocean. And I shot some photos for a studio painting—I had this idea for a painting, of my friend painting [a particular] scene—so it was kind of a set-up day I guess. Then this afternoon I worked on a little skateboard video for Red Bull. I still do a little bit of skate stuff, some graphics here and there, and some videos once in a while.

Cool. You said ‘plein air painting’ before too—is that what they call open-air painting?

Yeah, plein air painting.

So you’re out there with an easel.

Yeah.

I don’t wanna say that’s a dying art, but you don’t see people doing that much these days. I mean, when you do, you’re like, ‘Wow! There’s a dude painting outside!’

Yeah, I guess it’s a classical approach. It’s kind of awkward and cumbersome, but I like being outside and looking at the landscape, and trying to absorb those colours and those harmonies, and hopefully I can take that back and work on bigger paintings.

Do people stop and check out what you’re doing?

Sometimes they do.

Do they give you some criticism?

Not so much, but they sometimes say obvious things, like, ‘Why don’t you just take a photo?’

What do you say when they say that?

I don’t say anything; what can you say? Most people are pretty psyched though, but I generally try to paint places where there aren’t going to be a tonne of people hanging out.

And was that something you learnt from experience?

Yeah, from experience. People see you and they want to talk, you know: ‘Oh, I paint too! I like to paint dogs! What do you think of that?’ And over time it gets like, ‘Leave me alone, I’m in the middle of doing this thing,’ you know?

What’s the worst interaction you’ve had?

Last year I was doing an ink study of a view, and a woman was walking her son, her three- or four-year-old son. And she stops and she’s watching me paint, and I’m like, ‘Okay, cool,’ and then she starts talking to me, so I talk with her for a little bit, then she goes into this monologue where she’s telling her kid, like, ‘Look what he’s doing, see, he’s painting that palm tree, and look at the colours, and…’ She just went on and on, and I just kinda tuned her out. But then I went back the next day, and she happened to be walking by at exactly the same time with her kid, and she went on this mega-monologue again—I was just like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

You said that?

No, but I shot her a look like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ You know? ‘This is insane.’ And I think she got it, and got embarrassed and took off. But, um, that was a weird one.

Have you seen that Mr Turner movie yet?

No, I haven’t seen it yet. What’s it like?

Well, it goes for almost three hours and not a lot happens. I think artists and art industry people loved it, but the only thing I came away with was the olden days really sucked.

Was there a scene where he ties himself to the mast of a ship during a storm?

Yeah. That was probably the most engaging scene in the film and it lasted maybe fifteen seconds. But he actually did that: he tied himself to a mast and got thrashed around in a storm, right?

Yeah! You know, Van Gogh has a couple of big stories, cutting the ear off and stuff; Turner’s big story is he had the captain of the ship tie him to the mast so he could observe the storm.

Crazy. Why did Van Gogh cut his ear off—for a chick or was it meth related?

I think he was in love with a prostitute and she was trying to get away from him, and he had a mental breakdown, cut his ear off and tried to give it to her as some kind of token, but he was deluded.

Poor bugger. Do you think artists are inherently bananas? Are you a little bit nuts, do you think?

Well, we’re all pretty idiosyncratic and eccentric in our own ways. But I guess being an artist you have to be okay with silence and being alone. But that’s the same with writers, right? You’re alone a lot of the time and you have to deal with your own mind.

Totally. You know Joan Didion?

Yeah, yeah.

She’s got this great quote: ‘Don’t moan, don’t complain, work hard and spend more time alone’—something like that, and I think that sums it up. Although, I do tend to bitch and moan a lot. But the better you are at being by yourself, the better your work will be.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you find yourself getting distracted by your phone and computer?

Yeah, I’ve definitely had experiences where I’ve got hooked into it and had a day when I wasn’t so productive, or I was kind of thrown off and distracted because I got into emailing too early in the day or something. That’s happened several times actually…

So how do you remedy that? Switch all your devices off, or…

I mean I try to.

It’s tough to do though.

It is tough. I feel like the beginning of the day sets your whole trajectory. I’m really learning that as I get older: what I do with the first hour of my day sets it all up.

So what’s the ideal thing to do when you wake up, to make it a productive day?

Draw. Right away. Pretty much as soon as I wake up, if I can grab a pad and sketch the cat, or go out into the yard, or draw a still-life—just get into that visual mode and open up that part of my brain… It’s a weird thing, being in that zone, you know?

Right, right. I totally agree. I know for me, on those rare occasions where I’ve woken up and immediately begun writing—it’s just better. It flows and it’s way easier for the rest of the day.

Yeah! You’re not even thinking about it. Even though you’re conscious, maybe you’re not… Maybe your critical faculties don’t have as strong a hold first thing in the morning. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, you know? Choose the channel.