Paul SaitowitzThe kid from a broken home...

Paul Saitowitz

The kid from a broken home with a busted tooth and a battered spirit

splattering graffiti-like images over a skateboard rife with dents

and dings from grinding on gutters never strove to be taken seriously

as an artist.

The established art world is littered with academics preoccupied

with explaining the polemics of different periods and movements from

days of yore to even recognize his art ... and anyway he doesn’t give

a rip.

Street art -- by way of skaters, punkers, hip-hoppers and street

kids with spray paint, cameras, pencils, house paint, chalk and

discarded junkyard parts -- has been steadily growing for more than a

decade on cities’ outskirts throughout the world. Up until recently,

the art world didn’t have a clue.

Saturday night at the Orange County Museum of Art, “Beautiful

Losers,” a show highlighting several of the artists from that

movement, will have its opening.

“There are all types of artists in the show -- some are skaters,

others aren’t,” show co-curator Aaron Rose said.

“They are all outside of the academic world and ... they’re

unified in their attitude.”

The “attitude” Rose is referring to is the core of the entire

movement -- “Do it Yourself.”

These artists never set out to be discovered and invited to have

their pieces put in museums. They created their own galleries and

promoted them with homemade fliers and graffiti.

Rose converted a rundown warehouse in an industrial section of New

York City into a makeshift mecca for street art in the mid-1990s.

“There were all these kids starting to make incredible original

art, and they needed a place to display it,” he said.

Craig Stecyk, an artist in the show, grew up in Venice and started

photographing skateboarding in its heyday with the infamous Dog-Town

crew.

He has had a firsthand look at the rise of iconographic designs

among board sports.

“These types of sports have always attracted creative people that

liked to do things on their own terms,” he said.

“A lot of them were artistic, so adorning their skateboards or

surfboards or building cars came naturally to them. The boards were

their canvases.”

Another artist is Ed Templeton, a high school dropout from

Huntington Beach, who grew up feeling alienated in a broken home. He

found refuge in art and skating.

Today, that refuge is no longer just a home for the alienated; the

rebellion has been cut to fit.

“I got into skateboarding because it was the polar opposite of a

team sport,” Templeton said.

“It was something I could do by myself. When I was growing up, the

people skating were outcasts. Now they are the cool kids in school.”

The inevitable acceptance of counterculture by the mainstream is

what has brought this type of art into established galleries like the

Orange County Museum of Art, but the rebel spirit cannot be falsely

duplicated.

“This type of art and the attitude is now used in major marketing

campaigns like Nike’s ‘Just Do It,’ which is trying to make people

feel rebellious about buying sneakers, but the thing about the DIY

ethic is that the people involved really don’t care about stuff like

that,” Templeton said.

“They’re not worried about anything accept doing their art.”