The Art Of The Outdoors: Lucas Beaufort

The Art of the Outdoors: Lucas Beaufort.



This season we’ve partnered with unique artists and storytellers to create Merino wool socks and apparel saturated with inspiration.

First up: Meet artist, dreamer, skateboarder and traveler, Lucas Beaufort.

Tell us a bit about yourself.I’m Lucas Beaufort. French, dreamer, artist, traveler. Epicurean, you know the English word? It's a guy who loves to enjoy, loves to go everywhere. The guy who loves to experiment, is not scared to try things. I love to try everything. Even the thing that I don't like, I try it just in case I could love it.

Where are you from? I'm from Cannes, French Riviera, southeast of France. I grew up there and recently I moved to Normandy, which is an hour far west from Paris. Beautiful. Just nature, landscape, cows, a lot of animals. I moved there just to be close to the airport as I'm always traveling, so it's easy for me to catch a plane.

How did you get your start as an artist? I grew up with my dad collecting art. He has a lot of paintings. My mom paints as well, a lot of landscape, but it's different. My dad is more collecting art from old stuff and new, and my mom, she's more like that traditional thing, landscape. I like the fact that she created. It's just I never was into it.

It took me so many years to start and nobody would imagine me painting. I was 26, 27, which was like 10 years ago. When I started, I didn't know what to do. It was just random. I think painting was inside me and when it came out… poof! I can't stop now. I'm addicted.

I was sold out my first show and it was insane because I didn't expect to sell even one painting. And, to this day, I still wonder how it happened. I'm super grateful to live this life, and what I do all the time when I travel, I meet the younger people, older, whatever. I always tell people that it's important to lead the life you want to live no matter what. And it's not about much you're going to make. It's about you're happy to wake up and to do what you love. I don't care how much I make. I love what I do and that's all that matters.

How have the outdoors influenced your art and where do you draw creativity from? Everything around is inspiring. This element of being outside, reminds me my childhood and reminds me how beautiful it was with just a stick of wood—a simple skateboard or snowboard. The outdoors is just so important to me just because you don't need to pay anything to enjoy. You just have to look around you.

Music is also a big part of my creativity. I couldn't draw without the music. It's like you have to go out and put some fuel in your car. Same thing. Give me some music and I will make it happen. When I snowboard, hike, whatever, I need the music. It gives me just the little thing to put everything together.

Tell us about your creative process. I never sketch at all. I go straight to the canvas and I let my hand flow. It's just this guy is so in my head. It’s even like I'm obsessed by this guy. Sometimes I'm just eating and I start drawing the guy with my spaghetti and I don't know why I'm doing it. It's just so natural. So when I start doing the lines on the canvas, I could do it with my eyes shut and then it has to dance. As soon as I've done all the guys connected, I start to play with the color and the color is a big thing for me. I never use the color, the straight color, that exist on the tube. I want to make sure you can't reproduce the color. Even me.

I feel like my art is a balance between everything. I don't care about how technical it is. I don't care about all the details, but I do care about the balance. As soon as my canvas is balanced to me, I'm happy with it. The balance is everything and I think the balance in life as well. A mix of everything is needed to me.

How would you describe your style? Well, since I was born I had crazy nightmares. I was always waking up in the middle of the night by a monster or something, a creature. I was so scared about it and at the same time I was really into horror movies, which is funny because the more I was watching this, the more I was scared. I had those nightmares between 3 to 27 and 27 is the time when I started to paint. I realized that maybe it was all my things in my head, creatures and monsters, pushed to create.

So all the characters you see is my guys. So they were my enemies and now they're my best friends. It's kind of funny, you know? And they're all connected. That's another thing. All the lines that you see between all those characters means that my goal in life is to be connected with everybody, no matter how you are, your age, whatever. There's another thing: they don't have eyes, just a beak and a hat. Arms, big arms so they can hug people. They can share things with people. They have legs so they can skate snowboard, or hike.

The thing about the no eyes is just when you see people, you start judging. And when you don't have eyes, you just let your heart speaking. So it's more about feeling things, so I decided not to draw eyes just for this reason. It's about a feeling. It's about a vibe.

So these characters that you talk about, do you have names for them or do they represent things? Yeah. So my characters—monster, creatures, whatever, are evolving. The name of my guys is "Gus Gus." It's coming from my dog, my first dog that I've had. The last time my characters evolved, it was after my trip in Egypt. Cairo. That's why now you see a lot of my characters kind of like hieroglyphics.

We’re excited to feature your art across a range of socks. Tell us about the designs. Designing a pair of socks is not super easy because it's not super big space, so you’re limited a little bit but you have to find a way. And so the way I wanted to work on it is to be everywhere. So if I just have this space, let's cover it all. And, in term of designs we talked about balance. All my guys are connected or they are not connected.

On one pair of socks, you can see a lot of good things, a lot of creatures hanging together. You see the flower. Super nice flower. And you also see the guy reading the book. To me, the book is really super important. The guy holding a book is a way to say, "We have to learn something every day.”

The other pair you can see a tent here. The mountain vibe on this pair and a lot of love as well. Love is important in my drawings. It’s kind of like putting your feet on a bunch of love.

What do you want to see more of in the world? More respect for each other, to be more open, open-minded. We are all different, but we all live in the same planet.

Shop the Smartwool x Lucas Beaufort Collaboration

Check out this video to learn more about Lucas, and be sure to follow him on Instagram @lucas_beaufort.