Story by Luke Cumberland .. luke.cumberland@gmail.com
“It doesn’t matter what is said as long as it is said beautifully.” These are the words of 19th century literary critic Walter Pater, who would weep to see Tom Penny turn the awkward mechanics of jumping around on a slab of wood into pure harmony.
Pater believed in art for the sake of art. He valued stylistic beauty over complex content. Penny personifies the virtue of beauty on a skateboard.
Not to diminish the degree of difficulty of his tricks, and the physical risk involved, but I think most skateboard enthusiasts would rather watch Penny grace a curb with manuals and 50-50’s than watch a stylistic automaton throw himself down a triple set.
Well, I know I would anyway.
The real genius of Penny’s fluidity is his personality. After achieving skateboarding stardom beginning in the early 90’s, he fled the overbearing attention of the skateboard media. The sycophantic praise around him began to mute the music that he projected onto the rails and stairs in front of him.
So he did what any great musician would: quieted the world by turning his music up.
Upon his return from rural France, his parts in Flip’s Sorry and Es’s Menikmati reaffirmed the depth of his lithe style. His mind was refreshed by the hiatus, which translated into seemingly carefree skating.
In the middle of a switch 360 frontside flip on a mini-ramp in Sorry, he seemed on the verge of sleep. Though this is merely illusion created by his placid state of mind, skating comes as naturally to Penny as dreams to the rest of us. Without force; without effort.
Given the availability of the Internet nowadays, tricks like these can easily be taken like a daily medication for reality. Watching Penny switch flip trashcans and nollie big-spin sets is a close relative to religious meditation, and getting laid for that matter.
It keeps the mind relaxed and loose, like the man himself.
Though flipping through the pages of a skate magazine these days can feel like reading an instructional picture book—full of increasingly technical and dangerous stuntman skating—Tom reminds us to enjoy skating for its own sake, not for money or fame.
All Photos Courtesy Kr3w Clothing
“Art for the sake of art.” Like Pater said all those years ago in England when people sported monocles and read poems as current events in newspapers. And though Pater was long dead before Penny was ever born, Penny introduced a similar philosophy of “skateboarding for the sake of skateboarding” to a whole generation of skaters.
If poetry is the language of the interior world, then Penny is skateboarding’s poet laureate. The sheer musicality of his skating makes his tricks seem more like rhymes in a sonnet than foot-flicking and arm-flailing.
As Penny turns more and more spots into canvases, painting them with the graphics of his deck, his legacy is further solidified. He will forever be skateboarding’s chief composer, poet, and painter. Though decks break and scabs peel, true art dwells in eternity.
