Perfect Pairing: Just One Eye + Nate Lowman
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
The white canvas of high-top Chuck Taylors has tempted artists of all stripes to apply pen, paint, and even lipstick to shoes. But this fall, New York-based painter Nate Lowman has approached the idea in an entirely new way. Collaborating with Just One Eye, the Los Angeles fashion and art boutique on Romaine Street, Lowman deconstructed his own canvases to make 21 pairs of the famed Converse basketball shoes. To complete the project, the artist who grew up in Idyllwild and is known for appropriating images and repainting them, flew to L.A. to work with a cobbler on his version of the sneakers. Precise cuts were made in Lowman’s paintings that depict Willem de Kooning’s 1954 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, and the cobbler sewed the pieces of canvas into Converse shoes. Each pair took over 180 hours to make, and the sneakers are all one-of-a-kind. Paola Russo, co-founder of Just One Eye, has put together a number of these collaborations between fine artists and fashion lines, including bags designed by The Row and painted with Damien Hirst dots. “I love creating partnerships that are unlikely, especially between designers and artists to conspire, contort, and re-imagine the concept of high-art and fashion,” she says. For Russo, Converse is an “institution,” and she’s fascinated by the juxtaposition of shoes that took shape in the 1920s with work by Lowman, a contemporary artist born in 1979, derived from a painting created in the 1950s. One pair of the shoes even includes an image of de Kooning’s take on Monroe’s lips. The appropriation seems like something that may have charmed the star herself. Or at least elicited a wink.
By Elizabeth Varnell
Pictured: Paola Russo & Nate Lowman
Photo courtesy of Just One Eye
