On Company Time: Art Inspo with Zach Jones

In this reflection, Lucky Day editor Zach Jones traces the creative thread that connects his early exposure to skate culture with the enduring influence of artist Geoff McFetridge. What begins with memories of a blooming soccer career, skateboarding friends, and the music and films that shaped his youth evolves into a meditation on clarity, restraint, and the power of stripping a story down to its essentials.

In Zach's words:

While I was never a skateboarder myself, I was deeply committed to my soccer-playing career; the influences of my skateboarding friends soon became part of my life. At the time, a whole host of artists and sounds that entered my life still resonate with me: Spike Jonze, Radiohead, Ed Templeton and Toy Machine, Mark Gonzales, Beastie Boys, and films like Bottle Rocket. It was within this world that I first discovered the work of Geoff McFetridge, an artist who still sticks with me today.

I first discovered Geoff McFetridge and his art through his graphics for Girl Skateboards and later in Aaron Rose’s documentary, Beautiful Losers. What struck me immediately was the work’s profound simplicity and its unique, effortless sense of style. I was hooked. Over the years, I've watched his artistry evolve in a remarkable way, yet the core principle remains: the distillation of everyday moments into their simplest and most powerful forms. He has an incredible ability to observe a small, personal moment, like someone on a bike, or a hand holding a phone, and transform it into something with immense emotional weight.

This principle of simplification is something I constantly strive for in my own editorial practice. McFetridge's work constantly poses the central question of my own work… How do you strip away everything non-essential to make what remains resonate on a purely emotional level?

He achieves it with lines and color, in the edit suite, the goal is the same, but the tools are pacing, shot selection, and sound. Seeing how he reduces a complex scene to its graphic essence inspires me to find that same clarity in a sequence, to trust that a single, well-chosen moment can carry the most weight.

Ultimately, McFetridge's influence on me is less about a specific aesthetic and more about a creative philosophy. He teaches me that clarity is power, that everything can be found in the specific, and that the most resonant stories are often the ones told with the fewest words, or, in my case, the simplest way.

Check out Zach's work here!