Wall Power

Artist Elain Thompson can’t look at a blank wall without letting her imagination fly. So when her son set out to transform a Ventura warehouse into a gigantic skateboard park, she came up with a few ideas that were quite off the wall.

Thanks to her brushwork, Skate Street’s wheeled dynamos can zoom up a ramp and “surf” the crest of a killer wave that rolls off the wall in a splash of blue and white. Another curved ramp carries them into a painted snow tunnel that gives the illusion they are snowboarding on a tree-dotted ski slope.

In fact, Thompson’s creativity wraps around the entire building in a continuous mural that spans more than 14,000 square feet--and she’s not done. Most days she’s there, painting on the wall or the floor, oblivious to the nonstop roar of skateboarders and the pounding music they favor.

She’s also there to do the occasional touch-up on her masterpiece. “Kids skate the wall,” she said, pointing to a spot where skateboarders shoot off a ramp, skim the wall halfway up and land on another ramp.

She doesn’t seem to mind. When her son, Roger Thompson, 25, and his buddy Tim Garrety decided to open a skateboard park, it made perfect sense to her.

“Roger has great entrepreneurial spirit,” she said. He and Garrety built a skateboard ramp in front of his Ventura home when they were Buena High students.

Elain Thompson is professionally trained and attended the Santa Barbara Art Institute for three years. She’s had gallery shows and painted store displays, as well as cranked out portraits at Ventura’s California Beach Party. “Everywhere I lived I painted on the walls,” she said. Lining the warehouse’s walls with her murals seemed natural.

There were a couple of problems. Thompson had to conquer a mild fear of heights, since she needed to climb ladders and scaffolding for the job. There was also a matter of scale: She had spent the previous five years painting miniature portraits of celebrities--baseball players, movie stars--for envelopes prized by stamp collectors.

“I went from that to a 24-foot-high mural,” she said, laughing.

She worked with her son on the designs, trying to incorporate them into the maze of ramps on the floor. It’s not a fluke that the two work well together.

“I always had a vision I would do something with my Mom,” said Roger Thompson. “We’ve been doing projects together since I was 3.” Although she’s modest about her talents, he’s not. “I’m continually fascinated by her ability to think things through.”

Because of the placement of the ramps, sometimes it was impossible to paint with anything but a four-inch roller mounted on a 15-foot pole. Still, the results are dazzling, and the owners don’t mind if people stop by just to see the place. A cityscape of skyscrapers is the backdrop for a killer ramp with a numbing vertical drop. Another wall sports a familiar Ventura landmark: the two distinctive trees on the rolling hills behind downtown.

Thompson’s flair for illusion is uncanny. The building appears to have no corners. Part of the mural depicts the Ventura Pier, which looks perfectly straight even though the wall angles at that point. In another area, she has painted a European village setting with a cobblestone walkway that continues down the wall and onto the floor.

A speeding train graces one wall, Ojai’s Topatopa Mountains another. Other special effects--speed limit signs (95 mph), traffic signals, artificial trees--give the skateboarders and in-line skaters a sense of being outdoors.

Her artwork is everywhere except the ceiling. Glancing upward, brush in hand, Thompson mused, “I have some ideas.”