There’s something you should know about Marika Thunder. She isn’t all too keen on coloring within the lines. She never has—not as a child when she painted whimsical creatures on her father’s white Vans—and she’s not about to start now. Especially now that Lady Fortuna guides her as her muse as she delves deeper and deeper into painting with oils, a craft she dubs “alchemical,” and essentially “up to chance.”
With her arsenal of brushes, Thunder was painting a series at junkyards, materializing through her oils the mechanical divine. Then, there was that intuitive spark of eureka that couldn’t help but wonder, “Why don't we get the actual metal material on the surface of the canvas?” And so, the roulette wheel of creativity spun ever as fierce at the hand of Thunder. “I’ve always had a kind of curiosity in science and elements,” she recalls. “I recently got into using metal paints, paints that have, like, actual metal particles in them that you can oxidize with various chemicals, like patinas and rust oxidizers.” Ergo, the alchemy.
An artist’s intuition is one seldom at rest. It follows questions to uncanny places and even uncannier ideas that leap from those conjured prior—whether it be junkyard machinery, Lindsay Lohan, or beauty pageants in Corpus Christi, Texas, as in Thunder’s case. It’s cyclical. And it’s precisely that sixth sense that summoned her from out of the white-walled corridors of galleries and into the fashion sphere with her latest creative escapade: partnering with Vans to showcase its latest footwear release.
The skate shoe disruptor, like Thunder, sees self-expression not through the reflection of one mirror, but through the diffracted pane of a kaleidoscope, echoing different inspirations, experiences, and media into a vision of dazzling proportions. The latest vision to emerge: a crossover capturing all the creative zeal of Vans’ Premium Authentic Charms in Thunder’s Brooklyn-based studio. Blending textures so rich they leave the hand of many a spectator fervently craving a feel, if not only a graze, these kicks bring a grunge, weathered-down edge to elevated craftsmanship. Woven, splattered, sequined, coiled, and charmed, Vans’ cheeky new darlings bring Gesamtkunstwerk up from the arts and down to the shoes, every day motion as exhibit.
The Premium Authentic Charms, not unlike Thunder, know exactly who they are and what they’re working with. Loud, authentic, and unadulterated self-expression. Inspired by the brand’s famed Style Deck shoe, designed in 1966, now hailed as the Authentic, its latest embodiment distills that legacy, sealed with charms as intentional punctuation. Whether in white and black, green and blue, or red and navy, the Charm Pack lineup is an ode to artists and art aficionados who favor expression unfiltered.
If you ask Thunder when she thinks a work of art is completed, she’ll tell you it all leads back to instinct, that she’ll need to step back and look at the work as a whole. “I almost feel like when I make a painting or a work of art, it's like it gets a life of its own, and I have to be listening to it and looking at it,” she notes. But what would these works say if they could speak for themselves? Would they detail the splendor of the feel of wet paint on their canvased skins? Or would they whisper secrets of conceptual brilliance? The bittersweet truth is that one will never know. For all the back-stepping, the cycle never really ends, and part of the charm is the enigma.
The desire to express doesn’t die. It’s only reborn. “If you overwork a piece, then you gotta destroy some of it, and try to bring it back from there. That's also kind of a really fun place to be—and [the place for] a breakthrough sometimes,” she says. Just like energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed—at least, not entirely! It changes form, from paint to metal to canvas to shoe.
Click here to discover the Vans Charms Pack Collection.
