It’s our second instalment of illicit Art Attack. Half the fun of looking at the works of these…er..unique snowboard artists is looking through their websites. This week we look at US based artist Ron Merino whose website is a prime example of the genre…

Home Page

The home page starts with this text. Strangely Ron has written his introduction from the third person perspective:

“Welcome to our virtual gallery featuring the works of Ron Merino, a San Diego CA native. Ron demonstrates his artistic genius in oils. Through his extraordinary talent and remarkable ability to capture motion he gives us a profound insight into a movement in time.”

So he starts off straight away by proclaiming himself to be an ‘artistic genius’. He’s not just saying he has a bit of talent, nope, he’s saying he’s a fully fledged artistic genius, up there with Michelangelo, Monet, Picasso and the like. Not content with this he also considers himself to be an ‘extraordinary talent’ who has ‘remarkable ability’ and who can provide ‘profound insight’.

Now either this guy is the most misunderstood genius of our generation or he is profoundly nuts. Let’s see if we can determine which he is…

Getting a tattoo, it's a very important decision to get right. I look back at photos from a few years ago and I'm amazed just how badly my fashion choices have aged. I can only imagine how disappointing it would be having to look at some of these tattoos in the mirror for the rest of my life. Let's take a look at the damage.

Last season I was snowboarding in Big Bear (an American resort with correspondingly silly name) in when I noticed this sign…

American’s can be a pretty litigious race but I can’t help feeling that this sign was really over stating the bleeding obvious. Anyway, after taking this photo, and just to stick it to the man, I rode straight across the paving. That told them.

And it made me wonder what other stupid signs I could find. To save me visiting all the resorts in the world and wasting my precious time and sanity finding and photographing signs, I decided to use the power of the Internet to find/steal images from other people’s diligent research. 

Snowboarding Celebrities 3, 4 & 5 – Pingu, Seal and Heidi Klum

Now at first glance you might think that these three celebrities have little in common but you’d be wrong. Read on to see how they are linked into one seething mass of cutting-edge snowboarding journalism...

Your average snowboarder spends weeks salivating over snowboard purchase. They spend countless hours reading through the magazine tests, foraging through the Internet for any semblance of good advice, asking friends to give their opinion even if they know nothing about snowboarding and when we finally enter the shop we will spend even more time perusing all the shiny new boards and asking the assistant for even more advice. In the end we buy the one with the pretty colours.

And that’s just the start of the long and complicated relationship we will have with our snowboard as we pass the initial stage of lust into a state of love. It follows closely the progress of any loving relationship, except of course we go out of our way to batter our boards which ‘apparently’ is just not acceptable with spouses or kittens. But at some point we will tire of our once-loved boards and they will eventually find themselves replaced by a new more colourful and shiny object of our affection.

So what happens at the end of a board’s life? It’s a question on almost no one’s lips, so in a complete about turn on the shameless seeking of popular topics we have been covering of late, here is an article with no topical relevance at all.

Teaching an Old Board New Tricks...

Snowboarding always seems to attract creative people. At times it seems you can barely move for professional snowboarders who have a successful sideline in photography, movie making, clothing design, magazine writing or creating snowboard graphics. However this is is not the reality, it’s just that the non creative professional snowboarder types have the good sense to leave it well alone.

Just like the X Factor will find a few people that can sing it also manages to find the completely deluded in droves. To be honest my favourite bit has always been the shows at the start. Once they get rid of the freaks the whole show really losses my interest.

While perusing the Internet I have on numerous occasions been visually poisoned by these...how should I put it... mentals. There are in fact so many ‘artists’ that are worth covering that I realised that they couldn’t all be given the justice they deserved in just one article, so in what is going to be an intermittent series I would like to introduce...

illicit Art Attack #1 - Pascal Jean Delorme

While thinking about how to increase the readership we realised that we just had to embrace porn because it is after all the foundation of the Internet, and in our hour of need the people of Smugglers Notch have come to our aid.

Smugglers Notch sounds like smutty innuendo but rather disappointingly it is a small town in Vermont who are decidedly anti-porn. At least they are in snowboarding way.

The big news in snowboarding at the moment is that Burton has caused some controversy by plastering scantily clad ladies across one of their snowboard ranges this season. This has riled up the US conservative community, who having lost the presidential elections, are spoiling for something to complain about. It has annoyed literally some Americans to the stage where they are leaving their trailers, actually writing things and have been seen walking, in street protests.

Snowboarding Celebrities No. 2 - Santa

Christmas is here children. It's on this special day that Santa comes comes down your chimney and empties his sack. But have you ever wondered what Santa does with his time the other 364 days of the year?

I had never considered this quandary before but once I asked it the evidence was clear and overwhelming. The answer is - extreme sports. In fact I'd go as far as to say he is some sort of extreme sports god who has mastered the whole array of sports.

I know it will be hard for you take in the news that this big fat pie-eating brandy-soaked old man is a better snowboarder than you, and you might be a bit unsure about this whole extreme sport god thing, so I guess you cynics out there want proof.

Well here's the truth, lets see if you can handle it...

Sunday the 21st is World Snowboard Day

I always thought World Days were used to stop things we didn’t want like AIDs, child labour and Vegans, so I was a little bit worried to discover that there is a World Snowboarding Day.

For those of you about to hit Europe for a chalet holiday there is one thing you will always find in abundance - free and always surprisingly heinous wine. For years this evil beverage has served no purpose other than dyeing clothes and starting fights. However if you embrace this game's simple rules you will find yourself unlocking the door to a better chalet experience and a better life.