“I feel like I’ve hit a stride with this series,” says Ed Templeton from his home in southern California’s Huntington Beach. The artist and skateboarding hall-of-famer has resided in this surf-haven for some 40 years, during which its endless tract housing and sun-baked sidewalks have inspired his skating exploits as much as his art. For his latest exhibition at LA’s Roberts Projects, Templeton has produced a new body of painting and photography that he feels surpasses anything he’s made previously; a level change he attributes to the unbroken period of focus afforded by lockdown. While the paintings have reached new heights, the source material remains familiar, with Templeton mining the same inexhaustible weirdness and unique suburban psychology of Huntington Beach that he first brought to international attention with his breakout 1994 photo series, Teen Smokers.  

By Christopher Knight

At Roberts Projects, the straightforward yet eccentric glimpses of suburban street life in Ed Templeton’s closely observed paintings, drawings and photographs are like scenes witnessed while driving around alone.

A painting of a man seated benignly on a bus bench becomes inexplicably ominous as we watch him watch two young women ride by on a bicycle. A new collage of decade-old photographs of “Zealots With Crosses, Huntington Beach, 2012,” radiates an end-times vibe, its black-and-white juxtaposition of pleasure-seeking beach bathers and evangelical religious fanatics artfully torn in two.

“Part of what I’m exploring in my work is that all these punk kids were the product of parents who were part of the ‘white flight’ out of LA during the 1950s and 60s,” Templeton says of the mass exodus of middle-class white families who moved to the suburbs just as the local Black and Mexican populations were on the rise.

“They created this idyllic space outside the city with a four-bedroom house and a white picket fence to have a family,” he says. “But that’s been a breeding ground for people like me, as well as the punk and skateboard scenes. In the 80s, everyone I hung out with, their parents were divorced. We were probably drawn to skateboarding because it was individualistic.

Roberts Projects announced The Spring Cycle, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs by Ed Templeton that are a direct response to the suburban environment he lives in. These new works create hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. The exhibition runs January 22nd - March 5th, 2022. This is the artist's eighth solo show with the gallery. Templeton’s most concise works to date continue earlier themes cynical of the provincial customs and rituals of his surroundings, notably the ever-polarizing political milieu over the last five years in Orange County where he lives and works. 

The American suburbia and its customs and rituals have been informing Ed's oeuvre for decades. Currently on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, his latest body of work titled Spring Cycle is a continuation of this exploration, with a novel storytelling approach. Featuring suggestive imagery, unsettling portraits and idyllic landscapes, these paintings present hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. Executed in a realistic style that has defined his painting practice, these scenes are at once familiar and enigmatic, creating an unsettling feel. These paintings are juxtaposed with his works on paper and original photographs which provide further insight into them. 

From now until March 5, 2022, Templeton’s recent paintings, alongside a series of drawings and photographs, will be on display at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. The exhibition, titled “The Spring Cycle,” unpacks his complex relationship to Orange County, the conservative district in California that he still calls home. “I found punk music and skateboarding which altered my worldview and disappointed my grandfather,” Templeton said. “I was eager to escape this provincial region, but through twists of fate ended up staying here and planting roots among the endless blocks of tract housing.” 

Roberts Projects are opening The Spring Cycle, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs by Ed Templeton that are a direct response to the suburban environment he lives in. These new works create hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. The Spring Cycle marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery.

As a multidisciplinary creative Templeton has proven to us over the years that the saying "a jack of all trades, is a master of none" has its exceptions. For some, he is an iconic skateboarder that left an indisputable mark on skateboarding's evolution as well as changed its structure and unwritten rules with his company, Toy Machine. For others, he is a street photographer who provided us with an insight into the world of skateboarding, punk, misfits, and disaffected youth, developing a sensible eye for the true image of suburban America along the way, especially Southern California. And finally, he is an illustrator and a painter whose studio works have the ability to emphasize and underline the things he is seeing with the naked eye and through the lens.

By Katy Cowan

In an upcoming exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs, Californian artist Ed Templeton gives us a revealing insight into life in Orange County as politics and culture wars continue to divide hearts and minds. Through his works, we see brutal scrutiny of what it means to be human as well as feel isolated in American suburbia today.

By Miss Rosen

Hailing from southern California, Ed Templeton got into the punk and skateboard scene in 1985. At that time, the aesthetics of rebellion were becoming codified as politics and style become strongly intertwined. Perhaps the most visible symbol of rebellion was Mohawk, a hairstyle that took its name and style from an Iroquois tribe residing in Quebec and New York.

By Emily Manning

With ‘Hairdos of Defiance,’ the artist and former professional skateboarder chronicles the punk rock rebels who shaped his youth. 

When Ed Templeton discovered skateboarding as a middle schooler in the mid-1980s, being part of one subcultural youth tribe unexpectedly granted him entrée into another: the punk scene. “Just having a skateboard gave me access to these kids that, up until that point, I would avoid.

By Carolina A. Miranda

Look at the paintings of Ed Templeton and you’ll see all of the elements that compose the trope of Southern California as paradise: suburban houses with tidy lawns, blue skies, the ocean and, of course, women in bikinis. But Templeton isn’t making placid pretty pictures.

His broad view of the Huntington Beach Pier shows the steaming AES power plant in the distance as a Goodyear blimp advertises divorces overhead. On the pier, a religious zealot totes an oversized cross, while a young woman in cut-offs holds a baby in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other — a dystopic contemporary Pietà.

If you follow Ed Templeton on Instagram (which you should), you have been lucky enough to enjoy his #dailyhbpierphoto and ongoing documentation of the people and culture surrounding the iconic pier in Huntington Beach, California. The legendary skateboarder, photographer, and artist's fascination with the peculiarity of Huntington Beach is the inspiration behind his new exhibit Synthetic Surburbia which will open at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angles on April 25th, 2015. We headed over to the gallery this week to catch a preview and watch Ed set-up!

By Robin Nierynck

Contemporary artist and skater Ed Templeton explores the sinister depths of suburban life in California’s Huntington Beach, with a new solo exhibition of paintings Synthetic Suburbia at Roberts & Tilton gallery in Culver City, California. A chronicler of Southern California life, Templeton has long photographed the people and culture around Huntington Beach, where he grew up. Now he’s moving into the suburbs, for an expedition into the secret lives of its residents. With Synthetic Suburbia, Templeton seeks out the darker side of the coastal town, unveiling its shrouded elements of strangeness and fabrication. “Synthetic Suburbia is a culmination of years of looking at the place where I live and the peculiarity of it,” says Templeton, “I have travelled all over the world and there is no place as strange as Huntington Beach.”

By Jamie Sims

Teenage kissers. Teenage smokers. These are the very distinct themes by which the photographer Ed Templeton has organized his work. But for his newest book of photographs, “Wayward Cognitions” (Um Yeah Arts, out in October), Templeton dispenses with categorization and instead culls a loose collection of images from his 20 years of travel as a professional skateboarder and artist. They capture the kinds of fleeting moments that are the hallmarks of classic street photography.

By Amy Duran

This past weekend we stopped by the jam packed opening of Memory Foam, Ed Templetons latest solo exhibition at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles.

By Robin Fleming

Professional skateboarder and artist Ed Templeton unveiled a new collection of his photographs this past weekend. The show, titled "Memory Foam," captures Templeton's impressions of the people of Huntington Beach, Calif., and is hanging at the Roberts & Tilton art gallery in Culver City, Calif.

Templeton is an active and inspired member of the skateboarding community. He's ridden professionally for more than two decades and is the founder and owner of the Toy Machine skate brand. He's also a prolific and widely collected artist and photographer who's shown his work around the world and has published multiple books.

By Christopher Knight

Society was transformed when President Eisenhower championed the construction of an interstate highway system in 1956, with its profound alteration of personal and commercial transportation and the elevation of auto manufacturing into a top-tier enterprise. With considerable justification, it has even been said that asphalt built the American middle class.