velvet oracle
Ed Templeton on the week as it actually runs, and whose opinion still counts.
Interview / Issue 02. Interview by Pascale Arahia. Answers supplied by email, July 2026.
Ed Templeton has been represented by a gallery since 2003, and there are three of them now, in Los Angeles, Antwerp and Copenhagen. None of them has any say in what he makes. That distinction is the subject of this interview.
The practice came first and the institutions arrived later, which means they arrived on his terms rather than setting them. What that looks like from the inside is less romantic than it sounds. He loses hours to Instagram. He owes Toy Machine between eleven and fifteen graphics every three months and has not been in the darkroom lately.
He is also specific about whose opinion counts. His team manager and his videographer make major decisions with him. The people who write to tell him he is going to hell do not register.
Who he is
Ed Templeton, born 1972, lives and works in Huntington Beach, California. He turned professional as a skateboarder in 1990 and founded Toy Machine in 1993. The company moved to Tum-Yeto distribution in 1994. Inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2016. Represented by Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp and Nils Staerk in Copenhagen.
01
What does a making week actually look like for you right now? Not the ideal version but the real one.
I’m a master procrastinator. Lots of time wasted looking at Instagram. My weeks fluctuate, depending on what pressing item is in front of me each day. Some weeks it’s skateboard graphics, and on those weeks when I have a deadline, I am sketching, drawing, scanning, and coloring the graphics on the computer all day, every day. Of course, taking calls and emails in between. I take a mid-day backyard matcha break with my wife, Deanna, and we watch the hummingbirds and lizards. I take a shower and bike ride every other day. Around 6 or 7 pm we make dinner, take a walk, and then veg on the couch watching TV and movies until 1 am. But the workday is pretty hardcore, if not splintered. A single graphic can take 2 or 3 days of work depending on the complexity, and I need to make 11 to 15 of them every 3 months.
Days often get derailed by emails that might require me to do all sorts of random things like writing an introduction to a book or scanning and prepping photographs for a project.
When I’m not on deadline for graphics my weeks are a little more open, and I will spend time drawing and painting, as I consider those the best use of my time. And then other days I will scan pictures and process them in Photoshop and prep them for use in a future book. I’m constantly working on the photo archive and future book projects, so if I’m not preoccupied with work for Toy Machine, then I am doing other things that I want to do. I don’t get into the darkroom at all lately. Free days for painting are nice, but it’s a constant battle to keep focused with all the social media distractions.
02
Do you experience painting, photography and skating as separate practices, or is that a distinction other people impose on what is, for you, one thing?
For me as far as workflow goes, all of those things, making graphics, making paintings, out shooting photographs, or home scanning them, are part of a creative flow. They are separate in many ways. My graphics don’t look like my paintings and vice versa for the most part. My photography on the other hand is something I use as a reference for my painting, so there are more direct similarities between those two. The results look very different, but the creative source is the same.
03
You have been photographing the same world for decades: Huntington Beach, the people around you. What does it do to you to watch a subject age inside your archive?
It’s been interesting watching Huntington Beach evolve, but then also myself evolving within this environment over time. The population has changed, and the vibes have changed, but also my understanding of where I live has changed and in many ways has soured over the years. I have become less interested in the people and the scene here since the pandemic and the ‘Trumpification’ of downtown. Where I live is very conservative.
Lucky for me, photographs are a time capsule and I have captured a very important time period in this place which (I hope) will age like a fine wine. I still go down and shoot here and there, but much less than I did pre-pandemic. Our whole society has gotten a lot more suspect, and circumspect. It becomes harder to shoot down there, but that also could by because of my age.
Lucky for me, photographs are a time capsule and I have captured a very important time period in this place.
— Ed Templeton
04
What has changed about why you make work? Not the process, but the reason underneath it.
The reasons haven’t changed much at all. I still have ideas and understandings about the world I live in, and these metamorphose over time, but the drive that makes me want to make paintings and shoot photographs remains the same. I don’t know if I can completely explain it. It’s been something built into how I operate. I just like contributing to these worlds and having that visual conversation with the people who are receptive to it. I like challenging myself to make a painting that is worthy of being in the canon of art, and the same goes for photographs.
05
Toy Machine has operated independently since the start. What does running something entirely on your own terms actually cost, not financially, but in terms of what it demands of you personally?
I am very lucky to have gotten Toy Machine to a place where, in many ways, it doesn’t take too much of my time. The people at Tum Yeto are responsible for production, ordering, and selling the boards, and I’m lucky to be up here at my house just coming up with marketing ideas and graphics and doing all the fun stuff like the ads and deciding who is on the team. We have been skater-owned and operated for 33 years. I honestly can barely believe we’ve made it this far.
There is certainly a cost, in that at certain times it is very taxing and probably hurts my other creative pursuits, but that’s a first-world problem, and inevitably, since I work on many different fronts, certain parts of my output will suffer at the hands of another. I am careful not to complain too much about having to work extra hard to get graphics done by a deadline because it’s a lot better than digging ditches. But there’s also been a hidden benefit in that this company and skateboarding have made all the other pursuits in my life possible. I’m also trying to come to peace with the idea that I will certainly not complete all the projects I have in my head in my lifetime, so I need to just work on what I can while I am alive.
06
At what point, if ever, did outside opinion stop affecting what you made? Or does it still?
Outside opinions matter a lot. I get opinions from my friends about certain photographs or paintings, or even within Toy Machine, I talk to the team about who else is on the team, and I trust my team manager, Mike Sinclair, and my videographer, Don Luong, to make major decisions. If the consensus is that something I’m doing is lame, then I certainly wanna change course. But you also have to be able to evaluate the opinions you are getting, so if the opinion I’m getting from random people is “stop being political”, or “you are going to hell”, then I discount those opinions greatly because the opinions of a religious zealot or right winger are valueless to me.
07
When a body of work doesn’t land the way you expected, what happens next?
It’s sad when something you do doesn’t spark the interest of the viewer, so you try to assess what you’ve done and learn from those mistakes. Because artwork is a conversation, and you want your ideas to be conveyed interestingly and artfully, if you realize that the way you’ve expressed it is muddled or unclear, at least for me I wanna change it so that it lands. Obviously you don’t want to dumb down what you’re doing for the less intelligent people in the audience, but I do want to take into account how my work is perceived.
08
What are you still trying to figure out?
Everything. I know absolutely nothing about anything. I’m a high school dropout. I have been around for over 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot and seen a lot, but the more I learn, the more I realize how much more complicated the world is, and how much I’m missing. Almost every day I see a new word I need to look up, or a concept I’m unfamiliar with. So I hope to be a lifelong learner.
Ed Templeton answered by email in July 2026 and revised his answers on 13 August. Copyedited for transcription errors only. Interview: Pascale Arahia · Portrait: French Fred · Artworks and photographs courtesy Ed Templeton