about us

For the snow-sport veterans, it is no revelation that what we traditionally call “art” – in an alpine sense – typically falls in one of two categories: 70s-style oil paintings that feature heavily-forested powder-ridden slopes, rabbits, deer, and reek of smoke, or European après-ski posters dated, dusted-off, and tattered, filling every bare wall in a cozy cabin or snow-covered tavern.  Here at lifts&bounds, we believe it is time to shake things up!  By no means are we asking you to part with tradition; instead, we seek to re:fine art, specifically alpine art, and capture the natural facets of the winter-world that we all know and love. 

Many of us spent our formative winters skiing or boarding at a resort that we learned to call home.  Or perhaps there’s a particular run or resort buried in powder out there that you can just never leave behind.  Regardless, many of us have grown attached to some particular winter venue, resort, or individual trail and we hope to preserve that very attachment in our own memory. 

We live by direction; heaven knows humanity is always looking for the shortcut or the quickest way from point A to B.  In a society that’s come to embrace maps as informational pieces, is it too late to recognize the art-form that maps capture in their very being?  At lifts&bounds, we confronted this very question in late 2011: can trail layouts be embraced as artwork?  We couldn’t be kept to our posturing, and thus we set out to explore a market without a single expectation related to demand. 

In turn, we’ve created semi-abstract designs that represent the trail layouts of a great many North American resorts and done our best to do so artistically.  We don’t intend to stop here.  We are intrinsically motivated to capture not only the best resorts the world has to offer, but to include each identifiable winter venue and artistically define each and every far-flung resort, no matter how large or small.  We believe that in every market there’s someone that loves their resort and we wouldn’t want to exclude anyone from our passion: capturing our own home runs or our favorite trails in their true and natural art form.