Brandon Boyd Teams Up With TOMS Shoes For The Collaborative Canvas Project

Brandon Boyd is the lead singer of the multi-platinum band Incubus, a prolific artist, an award-winning surfer, a credible musician and a female ‘heart throb.’ Despite all of his time in the spotlight, Boyd remains as friendly, down to earth, ego-free and socially aware as ever.

This summer, Brandon Boyd teamed up with artist and friend, Kristin Klosterman, for the TOMS Shoes Collaborative Canvas Project. The pair created works of art on massive canvases, which were then cut up to create special limited-edition TOMS Shoes.

Causecast’s Brandon Deroche caught up with Boyd at the release party to speak with him about how the shoes came to be, the higher form of communication presented in music and the hope for a singular state of mind known as peace.

Causecast: Can we talk briefly about how this came to be, and was it a tough decision to make?

Brandon Boyd: It was not tough to decide to want to do. I had met some of the people from TOMS previously and we talked about doing some type of collaborative project, but we didn’t really know what. We just knew that there was some sort of similar energy at work. So I kept seeing them, we kept just sort of brainstorming, and I was just saying to a friend before that I kind of assumed that they had already done a project like this. I think it would have come up sooner had I known. And we started brainstorming, you know, this came up, this idea of doing original canvases that they made into shoes. They hadn’t done it before so we were like “let’s do that.” And then they asked if I knew anybody that I thought would want to collaborate with something like that. So my friend Kristen is a friend, a really good artist, and my neighbor too, so it all just sort of came together, it wasn’t hard. It was hard to do because…it hadn’t been done before and there was no like, road map for it. Untreated, unstretched canvas is really hard to paint on too. So that part was difficult.

CC: That’s what I wanted to ask you – collaboration in music is one thing, but when it comes to painting, how do you decide what you want to paint together?

BB: (laughs) It seems kind of boring to present it like this, but…I never know what I’m going to paint until I’m painting it, and in this case with the TOMS collaboration, it was no different. Got to Kristin’s studio, and they had massive pieces of canvases in big rolls, and we rolled them out and duct taped them to the floor, and had a bunch of paint…just started painting, so…that’s my favorite way to paint. I don’t really like pre-meditating things too much. I’m still hell-bent on like the experience of painting, you know the process of painting, as opposed to like trying to achieve an immediate end result. So, I started working and the first canvas I did on my own, I was kind of feeling it out. On the second canvas, the one we ended up collaborating on, I started to get this flow, line work. I think some of the better shoes in the collaboration are from the second canvas, that was the one that Kristin and I did together.

Read the whole article at http://www.causecast.org/music