TODD BRATRUD Artist in the pushzone

32 years old, born in Crookston, Minnesota, works for Flip Skateboards / Nike SB / Consolidated Skateboards / Burlesque Designs / Volcom / Mega Fauna / Skateboard Mag / Life Sucks Die Magazine.

Can you tell us a little bit about your parents and the way you grew up?
I grew up in a little town in northern Minnesota in a kind of farming community with nothing much around instead of farms and dirt roads. As far as skateboarding there wasn’t much going on. My little brother had a skateboard and got into it and I kind of latched onto that and kept with it. I was probably the only one skating there for almost 4 years and I just tried to get all the magazines I could, which was pretty hard from there, but yeah like I said: small town!! My parents were pretty cool. They were supportive all along. I guess they didn’t see much of a future in skateboard art or skateboarding at all but they never said to me not to do it. As I got older they just kind of gave me the hint to maybe quit at this point and find something normal. Because like I said in our town it was a really odd thing to do and I didn’t see much of a future in it myself. At that point there were so few skateboard companies and so few artists doing their stuff that there was really no room to do it. I only knew I liked it so I just went for it.

So was it skateboarding that got you into drawing or did this happen apart from that?
I guess I liked to draw before but I didn’t really know what to do with it. It was just fun and I wasn’t really good at it. But when I started seeing Thrasher magazine and seeing all the Pushead stuff like that „Pushzone“ section he did, and Andy Jenkins with his „wrench pilot“, that was the biggest part that got me into it for sure! I wanted to do that. I mean not to do the same style, but just to make this kind of graphics. So yeah it was totally skateboarding that brought me into art!

You grew up in a farming area. Was this the reason for doing all those graphics which show dead or punished animals?
I don’t even know where all of that comes from. I mean you see a lot of that stuff out there on the country roads, like dead animals and shit. When I saw something next to the road I always took photos of it.But I think I just like the shock value of those graphics. It is not too terrible but it is enough so that when you look at it you either like it or not but at least you will remember seeing it. I guess it does the trick!

Have you been to an art-school after recognizing that you like drawing and wanted to keep on going with it?
In that time skateboarding wasn’t big (it was around 1992) and it didn’t seem that there was a chance to make a living of it. It just seemed to be cool but you couldn’t see much of a future in it.So I was just trying to figure out what to do and I went to art-school. This only lasted 3 months and then I dropped out. I hated it from the first day. It was awful because I knew how I wanted to do things and they were always telling me to do it in a different way. Especially in skateboarding I don’t think that having an art-school diploma is gonna mean anything. So I just quited and started to freelance a little bit, doing a lot of odd art jobs that weren’t cool at all.

Did you do skateboard related works before you hooked up with Consolidated?
None that I got payed for. There was a skateshop in Minnesota called „Phobia“ which started in 1994 and some friends and I got into it and started to get a team together. I did a lot of shirt and sticker graphics. Also some board graphics and that was my kind of jumping board. My first taste of art that went on skateboard related stuff. But there was no money in that. It was strictly for helping the scene out and to do what I could to contribute to skateboarding in that area. It was a good starting point and made me realize that I definitely wanted to do something in skateboard art. I always knew that but it was that push to really make something happen.

So how did you get to work for Consolidated then?
That happened really randomly. My room mate at that time Billy Karm was riding for Consolidated and they sent me one or two boards in his boxes once in a while because
I talked to them on the phone when they called for him. So I sent them a „thank you“ letter once with a drawing on the envelope and after a little while their artist Moish Brendman called me and said: „Hey that thing you sent, we wanna do a board graphic with it. Will you give us the permission to do it?“And of couse I said yes because for me at that time Consolidated was the radest company and it still is. Everything they represented and what you saw visually on the boards was top of the heap for me and I asked them if I could send them more stuff and then it kind of snowballed from there on. Randomly their artist there for five or six years didn’t want to quit and I was at the point wanting to do as much as I could. So I just kept on sending them graphics everyday and they asked me if I wanted his job. I moved out in two weeks and went down to Santa Cruz.

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