Provided photo.

Keenan Perren likes to hold onto things. Specifically, skate boards. For the 31-year artist based out of Bradenton, however, the skateboards he keeps aren’t just for sentimental value. They are the very medium that he works with.

“When I left New Jersey, I brought my broken boards with me,” says Perren, who moved to Bradenton from South Jersey in 2012. “I’d always kept my boards and I didn’t really know what to do with them. Eventually, I started cutting them into squares with a jigsaw and sort of collaging them together.”

What began as a way to stave off boredom has evolved into a full fledged artistic practice. Perren likens his work to stained glass—using just the boards themselves, without the use of added paint—he manipulates pieces of skateboards to create various types of sculptures and reliefs. Oftentimes these sculptures are depictions of his friends and fellow skaters, other times they are more abstract, such as figurines that use the wheels of the boards as “heads”. “I’ll often take pictures or drawings that I have and put them together on my Ipad to make a template or pattern for the piece, similar to a mosaic. A skateboard is curved, so I have to use smaller pieces of each board to make the work flat,” says Perren. “I print out a pattern—like if you were creating a template for stained glass—and then build it piece by piece, using a scroll saw to cut up the boards before sanding them down and putting it together like a puzzle.”

The skateboards themselves are a product of Perren’s community, coming from his friends, local shops like Compound Boardshop or even fans online. Skateboards are typically either made from seven layers or nine layers of hard-pressed maple. Underneath the graphics that adorn the deck of every board are layers of differently colored wood that Perren can reveal with a sander. “It’s similar to if you were creating a collage from a magazine, seeking out the different colors. If I need blues or greens, I just look for a bunch of boards with those colors, whether they’re in the graphic itself or underneath it,” says Perren. “I try to keep parts of the graphic so that people can tell the board has been skated, that it had a life to it.”

Keenan Perren’s work can be found on his instagram page, @ayekeenbean and has been shown at various galleries around Sarasota and in Michigan. From January 7-28, he will teach a Mixed Media Collage Portraits class at Art Center Sarasota.

Provided photo.

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