Surf Art

Surf Art

Surfboard as canvas

Going…Going …Gone! … The wooden hammer came down with a crack on the pine block, and the spin paintings went to a lady in a yellow dress for £21,000 and £38,000. This was 2003 and the surfboard charity auction was called Longlife, organized by Oxbow and Surfers Against Sewage. Damien Hirst and Maia Norman (then the partner of Damien, and a very talented surfer and fashion designer with her own label, Mother of Pearl) donated two spin paintings, both majestic psychedelic rashes of colour invested with the logic of gravity induced by the spin machine. They hadn’t donated artwork for charity up to that point. Eleven sleek and glossy longboards (built by late great Cornwall-based shaper Chops Lascelles) had been blessed by other artists including Jamie Hewlett (Gorillaz and Tank Girl) and Banksy (still on the ascent). The works were sprayed onto cloth and glassed into clear resin on the deck. The auction raised £77,000 for Surfers Against Sewage and their longstanding fight against marine and coastal pollution.

In fact, it was Maia who physically poured the paint that created the spin paintings on the surfboards, but Damien of course gets credit because the creative production process was his idea, just like the ‘spot paintings’, of which there are over 2,000 but only six or so of which he actually painted himself. But why would the lady in yellow want a spin painting on a surfboard, even if the money was going to a great charity? Was the buyer going to hang the surfboard like a painting, or surf it, putting the art at risk?

Hanging the board as an artwork has a long history. Vintage boards themselves are often hung and displayed this way just for the beauty of the object – the surfboard as sculpture in its own right. Sometimes the board shape itself may be ugly or uninteresting, but the board is vehicle for a significant piece of artwork. A recent UK touring exhibition of surfboards – The Endless Summer - shows off a collection normally displayed at The British Surf Museum in North Devon. One of these, from 1970 – a rather ugly 7’1” made as a ‘stock board’ for the average surfer - was shaped by John Conway in Newquay and glassed by my dad (Alan ‘Fuz’ Bleakley), with a large black and white decal just under the glass of an eagle with wings outstretched. This was a felt tip pen drawing on tissue paper. The tissue paper appears to ‘dissolve’ in the glassing process, becoming invisible but leaving the drawing intact. My dad produced only three of these eagle decals, amongst hundreds of graphic artworks and cartoons that he made for board designs, so it was good to see one of these surviving intact.

In the great tradition of board designers, decals were made (Bing, Takayama, Town and Country, and so forth) that became cult images for surfers and were reproduced on T-shirts and in advertising. For example, Town and Country surfboards in Hawaii had a Taoist Yin-Yang symbol in black and white that became one of the most instantly recognisable trademarks in surfing. Paul Holmes’ (British born, Cornwall raised former editor of Surfer magazine from 1981 to 1989) short-lived Toy Gun surfboards produced in Sydney, Australia, showed a faceless man holding a cocked, smoking gun whose barrel is an immaculately rolled reefer.

Designs on boards, glassed in as tints, sprayed on the foam before glassing, or applied after glassing, are one thing, but boards themselves of course are designed objects, things of beauty or ugliness. The board can become a fetish object, like Dick Brewer’s designs for big waves in Hawaii that echo back to original Hawaiian designs, with exaggerated, drawn out and pointed tails and noses. The boards were properly called ‘spears’. Other boards are born plain ugly, like the ‘Pig’, a blunted, rounded, thick-railed object designed for small waves; or its short-lived sister, the ‘tear drop’, a literal description of a small, light board with a sharp nose and an almost semicircular rounded tail, that - like a pear-drop - sucked!

A big design statement in surfing is made by those in cold-water climates – usually Northern Californians – who will only wear black neoprene wetsuits, despite coloured, colour-panelled, even florescent, neoprene being readily available. This darker minimalist statement (sometimes associated with a darker side of surfing associated with violent localism) is the Yang of surfboard colour design minimalism embodied in the Yin of clear or ‘white’ boards. This Zen aesthetic strips the board back to basics, where the super white foam blank (only made this way through ecologically disturbing bleaching processes) is wrapped in a dress of fibreglass that becomes see-through as the originally green-tinted resin dries to a hard, clear, transparent surface. The polyurethane foam core, or ‘blank’ is then exposed as a statement of Minimalism, where ‘blank’ is a fine description.

Surfboards as sculpture

Surfboards are both visual and tactile. Making them is vitally embellished by smell. Surfboard glassers - who cut, wrap and resin the fibreglass prior to it ‘going off’ or hardening, and then being carefully sanded and polished like a fine piece of sculpture – put up with the hazardous and harmful toxins they work with, that are eating away at their lung linings and the skin of their hands, because these chemicals smell so good. Resin fumes create a temporary high – just long enough to get the job done once a rhythm is established. Glassers and shapers get addicted to the penetrating pear-drop smell, despite the associated death toll from cancers.         

The original Polynesian surfboards were works of art, carefully crafted by hand from a variety of woods, treated as magical objects or talismans, given names, repeatedly oiled and rubbed down as if giving a massage to a lover. It is refreshing to see the surfboard shaper today, still an avid craftsman, hand-planing a blank and constantly picking it up and eyeing down the contours to spot bumps and dead spots; to shape in continuous flow from nose to tail, imagining how the board will be surfed; and to add innovations such as channels or concave on the bottom shape, ensuring in turn that the deck is flat and that the rails, where the deck and bottom meet, are perfectly foiled – downturned for a flat bottom throughout, or rounded, or sharper (‘foiled’). The rail shape matters, for flow, level of water resistance, and ease of turning. Surfers talk of ‘rail to rail’ surfing – one edge biting into the wave face, the other intermittently in and out of the water, until a radical turn causes the ‘trailing’ rail to suddenly be the ‘lead’ rail, ploughing into the wave face and catching. If overdone, the surfer will ‘catch an edge’, where the board stalls or tips and the rider is thrown in a wipeout - no problem on a gentle beachbreak, or a long, rolling pointbreak, but critical on a grinding, dredging, below-sea-level monster where no human should be; or a thirty feet high deep water reef wave where the white water will hold you under to the point of your lungs bursting as your beautifully crafted surfboard is snapped like a stick. Surfboards are functional sculptures that usually carry a short lifespan.

Rick Griffin’s legacy

But how will your ‘stick’ be decorated? Will you be drawn to the clean lines of colour-phobic Minimalism, or is your surfboard a canvas for expression? A cult genre of ‘trash’ art, with a base in California, largely drawn from the comics (or ‘comix’) culture and first transplanted as decoration on skateboard decks, has migrated into surfboard art and become a dominant form. These graphics are not to everybody’s taste – they draw on horror, the grotesque, and its contemporary gothic interpretations, refracted through metal, punk and garage musical influences. They are brash, colourful and often crude and sexist (tattooed men meet ‘vampy’ women), with bug-eyed, adrenaline-fuelled, salivating men-monsters with lolling tongues running or driving towards the surf. Nubile women in tiny bikinis hang by the roadside, hitching a lift, with a glint in their eyes. But the glint is in the imagination of the males who dominate this culture (with the important exception of Candy Weil, who satirizes the genre in a style that consciously throws back to 1950s advertising graphics), trying to grow into the shoes of their master – Rick Griffin.

Griffin invented the first surfing cartoon hero – Murphy, a goofy Californian kid of the late 1950s and early 1960s, who never grew up, but morphed into an acid discovery in the mid 1960s to create some of the first psychedelic cartoons. Griffin burned out early, a casualty of rock ‘n’ roll and love of motorcycles, leaving a legacy of an hallucinatory style to cartooning where meticulously detailed black and white shading would morph into full colour living dreams. Griffin was the house artist for ‘Surfer’ magazine, where an overnight revolution in the 1960s changed the graphic design from hip and cool jazz-inflected 1950s advertising to acid-soaked waves of colour and futuristic fantasy.

You can see Griffin’s influence everywhere in contemporary surf art – in Sam Clemente’s Drew Brophy, Sydney’s Ben Brown and Ottawa’s ‘Dirty’ Don Gillies, who collectively transpose Griffin’s late-period psychedelia to heavy metal and ketamine culture (that should of course be ‘kulture’ in comix style). The best of this art is more painterly, and less based in graphics. Rick Rietveld, a dedicated surfer and artist from Los Angeles, has produced perhaps the single most iconic image in surf art, reproduced I’m sure on many surfboards and certainly a T-shirt staple. Einstein, decked in Hawaiian shirt and sporting reflective sunglasses, plays a ukelele against a background of grinding waves and tropical vegetation. The high culture of scientific reasoning and intellect meets pop culture, saying ‘surfers have brains too’ and revealing that much of the lowbrow and lowlife content of contemporary surf art is actually tongue-in-cheek, ironic and self-satirising. Reitveld called his style ‘Pop Surrealism, with a saltwater twist’. His major influence is, of course, Rick Griffin.