Swanski emerged from Eastern Europe into a global creative landscape he first glimpsed through comics, imported skate magazines, and a raw, DIY state of mind. Long before the age of social media, he was already forming deep connections with icons of the skate world — building a personal path that mirrored a broader cultural shift.

In Wooden Canvas, the exhibition he unveiled last weekend in Milan, Paweł showcases over 140 skateboard deck designs, alongside paintings and installations that trace how skateboarding shaped his identity — as an artist, designer, and human being. Through his reflections, skateboarding appears not just as a physical discipline, but as a philosophy of life: one grounded in humility, resilience, and creative freedom.

What emerges is a clear link between going to the skatepark and going to the studio — two parallel acts driven by the same impulse for authentic expression. In celebrating Wooden Canvas, we celebrate a worldview shaped by skateboarding’s enduring and transformative power.

SKATING THE EAST 

“I’m from Warsaw, Poland and I was born in 1980. The first 10 years of my life i grew up in this kind of fucked up but incredible somehow communist reality. Fortunately, 1989 was the end of communism and the whole western culture came from abroad. So skateboarding was something fresh, something colourful, something amazing. Before even if we weren’t that close to the western world, we had Star Wars in the cinemas, Muppets on TV and we had some comic books on the bookstores shelves etc. I’m a child of that Pop Culture. It influenced me in a way, I was raised on pop. It was limited. It wasn’t so easy to get those things, but I was really affected by this whole wave of news from America and the West but in a special filtered way. It gave me a balance.

I came from the middle class, but I grew up in a very rich neighborhood. Other kids had the opportunity to buy exclusive goods like skateboards. I didn’t at the time. When I entered a skate shop for the first time with my mom, a skateboard was worth half of her salary because all the stuff coming from the States were super expensive. We couldn’t afford it even without being poor people. After a while, I managed to buy an old Powell-Peralta board, which was so wide, with huge wheels. I went to my friend’s grandfather’s workshop and we cut it out to the shape of the new, thin, more expensive, boards. We shortened the tracks, then shortened the axle, and we made the wheels smaller. It was super complicated but that was my first board. We were building everything ourselves at the time, it was really a DIY era.”

SKATE IS CULTURE, SKATE IS ART 

“I’m an artist and designer, but I came from urban art and culture, and first and foremost from skateboarding culture, these two passions of mine just merged together through the years. This is why this exhibition, Wooden Canvas, I’m here with, is made of: 25 years since I designed my first board. And I did more than 140 boards for different brands from around the world, and I just wanted to show them like a retrospective show. Working on it, I realized that skate culture is something much more important that influenced me over the years. If you’re a skateboarder, you think that many things in skateboarding are obvious, that it’s normal. But then I realized skateboarding changed me as a whole person, changed me as an artist, changed me as a designer, and changed how I look at the world.

I would be much different as a human being such as an artist if I never touched a skateboard in my life. I can definitely say that skateboarding saved my life at least a few times. It showed me how to stand up after the fall, and gave me the power to be humble and patient on doing things. In the end there’s always a prize and a win. With skating you win every time you go outside and start doing it, it doesn’t matter how it ends. Every time you go to the skate park, you already won, because you decided to move your ass to do something. It’s the same with going to the studio and making art. When I go to the studio, instead of thinking what I’m gonna do, how it ends and how I’m gonna make money with it, I think I’m already winning when I have the will to go and freely create for myself first.

Even if sometimes I had bad times with nobody asking me for a project, I was going to the studio, doing my stuff. This is the difference between doing it for the money or doing it to express yourself. I guess being an artist is being productive no matter what, even if someone wants to buy it or not. It ended up always with the same result. I made money with my art, but that wasn’t and isn’t the purpose. Because I was productive, I was doing things from my heart and it was coming from inside. This is what skateboarding gave me. This way of thinking has stuck inside me for the last 25 years or longer, but I just realize it now as an adult.

It’s crazy how much skateboarding reflects real life. There is no life without obstacles, it’s even more, life would be boring and flat without them. Facing obstacles makes us stronger and more interesting. I also don’t see any sports, football, ski or tennis building such a strong culture behind it. You’re a tennis player when you go to the court. If you’re a skateboarder, you are for 24 hours a day. You think like a skater, You see the cityscape in a different way. You see things in different ways. You face the obstacles in your life in a different way. And being an artist was a huge part of it. Just thinking about an ollie as a trick, which without that there are no tricks at all. If you try to explain to someone who doesn’t skate how it works, it’s like, the tail hits here, you have to pull here, but at the end of the day you have to be on the board, you have to fly with it instead of on it. It’s like magic. When you do it for the first time, the first time ollie something in your life, it changes your mindset forever.”

CRUCIAL CURVES

“Some of my friends from the scene started to make an urban/skate culture magazine in the late 90s. I was drawing and I came there with my drawings asking to contribute with illustrations, layouts, and graphics but I never had a computer, and didn’t know anything about photoshop, illustrator and those programs. I was just drawing but I wanted to enter that world. I understood it could be a way for me, so with the help of my mom I bought a computer to learn graphic design. A few days later I came back with some really amateur stuff made on photoshop, but it was, again, the skateboarder state of mind of looking at things: Impossible? Possible, just try it and repeat until it works. Soon I was designing layouts. This is how I became a graphic designer and worked on that same magazine for a long time.

After many years, I started to design and draw on boards, and I still think to these days that is the most beautiful shape to work with. It was something I always dreamed about but I never believed it would be possible. 

After high school I moved to Germany, to Kassel, for 5-6 years. I wanted to study Art but they told me that I would have to start from the beginning with how I draw or leave it and start doing something else or there is a small chance I will make it as an artist but there is still a lot of work in front of me. Instead of giving up, I just did it. When I went there I found out there was a huge skateboard scene. I showed up at the local skatepark and after a few weeks of living there I already had my new skate crew. In Germany I made my first skateboard for the company called Hessenmob, which is part of the Wooden Canvas exhibition. They had these series of boards made by designers from different cities and I made a board to celebrate Warsaw, my hometown.

In this first catalogue my board was next up to the boards made by Dave Kinsey, Evan Hecox, and other amazing artists who made boards designed for Hessenmob. From that first one, it was a snowball effect. I met Jan Kliewer, a German skateboarder who asked me to do his board for Cliche, a pro model board, that ended up with a whole boards series.”

MEETING YOUR HEROES

“I always wanted to do something for Girl Skateboards, it was my dream. Back in 1995, I was watching Mariano, Carroll Howard and all the “Girl” riders on video in Warsaw. I had this little dream but never expected that I would do something with them in the future. 20 years later I’m doing the Guy Mariano board. We are very good homies with Andy Jenkins, the brand art director for GirlSkateboards or Andy Mueller former Art Director of Lakai and have a great relationship with many other people there. For me this is a very important part of it. People and the story. The influence. 

I’m talking about this for a reason: for young people today the world is small, because of the Internet. You can basically send an email to anyone that you follow and maybe he will answer you. For me growing up in this reality without Instagram, being a kid from behind the Iron Curtain, I felt like I would swim by myself to California, do the extra work to make it. 

Still to this day I get excited when I chat with Steve Caballero or Mike Carroll even though I have known these guys for a long time now. They were my heroes. Now they still are, but we are homies. Sometimes in my head I’m still that kid from the east with big dreams, that’s why I’m always about the next work, the next graphic, the next piece of art. I can’t stop and I won’t. Also this power comes from the skateboarder attitude. 

Being an artist is a mix of hard work and a lot of luck. You have to believe in it so hard that it becomes reality. Right now I’m here in Italy, showing up with my show, paintings I did with people that influenced me as a kid.  It looks like success. And it is, but it’s still like I cannot give up because no matter how successful you are as an artist, you have to stand behind it and work hard.”

WOODEN CANVAS

“With ‘Wooden Canvas’ I wanted to show more. The core of the show is a collection of the skateboards I designed over the years. Original boards that were produced and some drawings that I didn’t sell and kept for my archive. The original drawings. From the first design to today I have this thing in my head: It always has to be hand-painted. If I do designs for packaging, t-shirt, clothing or a graphic for a board, it’s always hand-painted. Only after I work on it with the computer. I have millions of drawings all around the studio. Some of them are still there, others  have been sold. Lucky me, I was smart enough to keep some of them, so I can show some in this exhibition. But the show is also meant for the people outside the skate scene, because I know that skaters come and already understand. I wanted to show with this exhibition that skateboarding is a culture, it’s not a sport. 

We’re at the Olympics right now, which I’m not against. This is not “my  skateboarding”, but I love it anyway. I don’t think that’s against what we do. Real skateboarding lives and this is just a part of it. Maybe not every skateboarder agrees, but I think that skateboarding is more expression than just a sport. Every skateboarder who does tricks is an artist. It’s a personal expression. It’s funny to see in the Olympics how judges try to figure out how many points to give to a trick… skateboarding It’s something else. And that’s why I hope Wooden Canvas will live longer to show people the nuances of this culture. 

It’s an ongoing project I’ve been making for years, with every exhibition showing some extra different things every time. For example, I had an exhibition in Warsaw and I invited some different skateboarders to skate on this eye-shaped obstacle I made. This sculpture has the shape of an eye because in my art the eye represents humans. When we do tricks, every skateboarder challenges himself. We don’t challenge each other. The obstacle is you, and you challenge yourself. You have to force yourself, you have to fight your fears, be creative. Some skateboarders are fat, some are fit, some skateboarders are old, some are young, they are all skaters and they try to overcome their limits. It’s the same when you think that human beings are not  meant to fly,  and then we build rockets and planes. We think it’s not possible, then we dream about it and then we do it. It is the same in skateboarding and in art.”

SKATEBOARDING WILL NEVER DIE 

“Being an artist can be a hard job, even if I don’t save lives. But from time to time I receive an email or message on Instagram from a young man saying to me that he believed in himself and started to do designs or other stuff because of my work. These are the moments that make me realize that I’m doing something important.

The beautiful thing of Skateboarding culture is its multidimensional aspect, it’s all together: photos, videos, art, design, music. This is why I invited photographers to my exhibition, this is why we made a behind the scene video of the Eyeroll Obstacle, this is why we painted a series of paintings on boards with my guests like Huynh, Mueller, Jenkins or Caballero. The exhibition is by Paweł Swanski but it’s bigger than me. All the names on the pro model boards, all the people that are invited, the community, It’s the skateboard way. No matter if we are in the Olympics now, we are still real. You can be a boy, a girl, young, old, whatever. If you come and challenge and express yourself on the board everyone will embrace and respect you. It will never change. This is why skating is a culture, not a sport.”