I thought I’s post some paintings I did when I was in Italy. I was jonesing hard for surf and so I started some paintings. I did a series without the board showing, because I figured in Italy they’d have more universal appeal, like a water dance or something. I ended giving a lot away. These are some I kept.
More. some of you will recognize the photos I used to paint from. If my memory serves me right “The second reef” was actually a photo of Brian Buckley (?) which was /is my all time favorite photo. In my painting the guy came out a lot darker, looks kind of kanaka.
Did you go to art school or are you self taught? I will post a picture of my latest painting soon. I am self taught with painting.
I went to Cal State Long Beach, but I changed my major to art history after my first art class and saw works by Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Dan Flavin and I understood you cannot really teach art…
Ironically I now teach art at a middle school.
Your work is unreal. Put your work on Surf Cloth and lam it into a board.
My wife is an artist as well. She taught herself. When she tried to take classes
the teachers ignored her so she quit. Check out her work at: www.mariecward.com
If I gave you a canvas say (4ftx6ft) what would you charge to paint me something?
I traded some boards with Austin Howard for some paintings for my surf factory office.
Surf Art done well like yours is greatly apreciated.
You have a lot of talent!
Kind regards
Your work is unreal. Put your work on Surf Cloth and lam it into a board.
My wife is an artist as well. She taught herself. When she tried to take classes
the teachers ignored her so she quit. Check out her work at: www.mariecward.com
If I gave you a canvas say (4ftx6ft) what would you charge to paint me something?
I traded some boards with Austin Howard for some paintings for my surf factory office.
Surf Art done well like yours is greatly apreciated.
You have a lot of talent!
Kind regards
Sorry: The name of the artist is: www.ashtonhoward.com he is a surf artist like yourself.
I would like to get one of your painting for my collection.
I think surfers would really get rothko because they spend so much time staring at two horizontal planes of color.
Surfding, I really like your wife’s work. And those waves by Ashton HOWARD are better than photographs…
those are some great paintings – i recognized most of them frmo the pics, but you stylized them beautifully. the one of the guy lying on the beach staring out at the wave – that one was stored somewhere in some small, rusty, back-room file cabinet inside my brain. the first time i saw it it struck me - i never seen someone on the beach, lying that way checkin out the waves. very nice
I thought I’s post some paintings I did when I was in Italy. I was jonesing hard for surf and so I started some paintings. I did a series without the board showing, because I figured in Italy they’d have more universal appeal, like a water dance or something. I ended giving a lot away. These are some I kept.
It’s great to see this thread on your beautifull paintings! To me it’s a sign of a free mind. Keep them coming, and thanks!
Here’s what I’ve heard about coming up this summer in Laguna Beach.
http://www.lagunaartmuseum.org/upcoming_exhibits.html
This summer in Laguna Beach - Summer 2007
<div style="text-align:center"></div> <div style="text-align:center">Rick Griffin (1944-1991)
Pacific Vibrations original art for poster, 1969
Oil on masonite, 43 x 29 inches http://www.lagunaartmuseum.org/upcoming_exhibits.html
Collection of Jay Gould
Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence
June 24 to September 30, 2007
Main level
Rick Griffin (1944-1991) was a renowned “surfer artist” when he arrived in San Francisco in 1966 just in time to earn a poster commission for the Human Be-In. Creating a simple, yet powerful design for that event, he quickly made a name for himself with his brilliant lettering, use of nineteenth century graphics, humorous approach to advertising motifs, and breathtaking color combinations. Rick’s most famous designs include “Flying Eyeball”, “Aoxomoxoa”, and “Heart and Torch”. Rick Griffin’s style reached maturity in the richly colored psychedelic dance posters he designed for Bill Graham’s Fillmore and Chet Helm’s Family Dog rock concerts. There has never been a museum exhibition of Rick Griffin’s work. The exhibit would include a survey of Griffin’s work spanning thirty years from the 1960s until his death in 1991. Curated by Laguna Art Museum chief curator, Tyler Stallings. Accompanied by a catalogue.
piggybacked with a new show by Reynolds Yater, Kevin Ancell, and John Comer. John Comer paintings of famous surfing locations will hang w/ well known surfboards that evolved from those breaks, replicated by Yater.
Llilibel, very nice!
I played around with some ceramic fins last year. Here are a couple.
I went to Cal State Long Beach, but I changed my major to art history after my first art class and saw works by Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Dan Flavin and I understood you cannot really teach art…
Ironically I now teach art at a middle school.
A lot of Flavin I just can’t really deal with, although the color shift neon things around town here are really nice. There’s an installation that takes (took?) up a whole building that I always wished they would have done something else with.(http://menil.org/flavin.html)
Rothko I like a lot of, but it all depends on the colors–I kinda feel like the Rothko Chapel is a dark joke of a commission piece by a pre-suicide. http://menil.org/rothko2.htmlhttp://rothkochapel.org/virtual-interior.htm
I have a poster print of … wait a second… nope, couldn’t find it, but it’s a field of dark blue at the bottom and lighter blue in the top 75% of the frame–got it before I started surfboarding, but I like it better now
I like your paintings llibel03
When I was in college I did an internship at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles). I actually got to drive Dan Flavin around. I was thinking of doing a Masters degree at the time and asked his opinion and he said, “Don’t waste your time or money. They can’t teach you art! Do you think back in the early 60’s any art teacher would have told me to use flourescent light tubes to make art? Not a chance.”
I took his advice. Went and saw the world instead. I do like his art though. Some rooms feel like you’re swimming in color.
I also got to work for James Turrell. Jim is a consumate craftsman and his art blows me away. If you don’t know him check his work out. Jim, by the way, before he became famous as an artist used to restore old (cloth) airplanes and is passionate about gliders. He even bought a army surplus pressure suit because he wanted to get in the jetstream at 60,000-70,000 feet altitude and set the world glider distance record. the way he described it the jet stream is a cylindrical vortex and if you got on the right side (the side going up) you could ride it like angling down a wave. He was just missing one boot…
I know this is a surfboard design forum, but design and aesthetics, to me, are one and the same. Ever notice how things meant to go fast just look cool?
Turrell is my favorite artist, I think in the world. Ran across him by accident at a show at the Houston CAM. Adjectives don’t work. He has a permanent piece in the tunnel at the Houston MFA, and it’s pretty good but the works at that installation show and the works in his book(s) are beyond words for me. “Epic” maybe, but I feel stupid even trying. “sublime” I guess works.
Small photos online don’t even touch what it’s like to be in front of these pieces or inside them but anyway…
http://images.google.com/…&sa=N&tab=wi
There also a (Quaker?) Friends Meeting House here with a sky aperture in the meeting room, I need to go there. Silence and everything.
http://www.lasersol.com/…urrell/rc_links.html
http://home.sprynet.com/~mindweb/page44.htm
So if you create spaces that are rectilinear and still have them neutral in this very curvilinear, vluptuous earth form of the volcano in which all the forms are actually parabolic or elliptical. There’s one circular part, one crater that is actually within seven feet of being circular on a radius of 800 feet, 814 feet. It is within seven feet of being a perfect circle, which is amazing. This gives me a way to make curvilinear spaces neutral, whereas it is not quite as appropriate in museums and spaces that are rectilinear. The rectangle, sort of the slightly off square is much more neutral than is a circle or an ellipse in these situations. Otherwise it can become shaped canvases. When you come in you can see that there is a forming of form, but what becomes very positive is this thing in between the space, in the work that I do. At the crater I make an architecture of space and I use these forms to capture the light, to hold it, to, in a way, give it form, give it the space to reside. But it’s clear that it’s done so that it doesn’t reside on the wall. The light seems to fill the space. I think that that’s something you can feel. But it needs this architecture of form as well to capture light. Because I don’t want to take away from the form of this volcano, making everything underground avoids actually forming the outside of these spaces into a building. They are in fact built but they are underground so that the outside really continues to be the volcano. The reason that they are underground is partly for that fact, but more for the fact that I make light powerful by isolating it, and also that it is not very much light that I isolate. You may be looking at the light of Venus alone and you can see your shadow, just from the light of Venus alone, if you are dark-adapted for about an hour and a half. We see that well!
The reason I do this is that if you take your flash into a cave or a place that excludes all other light, it becomes quite powerful. So I need to have these spaces that are protected from other ambient light. I’m just taking the light from where I want it. So that’s why there is this underground architecture that in a way shares its outside form and opening with the bunker as in bunker architecture. Where the openings are made precisely, everything else is protected. In that way it also gives protection, it’s cool in the summer and actually somewhat warm in the winter. You can have places that capture and hold heat by being contained at the top and will become cold sinks by letting hot air go out and yet are shaded. This gives me a way to have a kind of a sparkling elegance in the human inhabiting of these spaces but it’s made primarily for the habitation of light. That is something we can walk through, even though all these sinks are completely open. That is, there is no glass: I can make the feeling of glass or the ending of the space quite easily, visually without having to do it with material. Everything is open, but at the same time it is protected, that’s why it’s underground.
This architecture, in terms of its form, shares similarity with the bunker architecture, in terms of its openings, except we’re not looking at fields of fire, we are looking up to certain portions of sky and protecting all else, and on the interior formed out in a way that it speaks of the naked eye observatory, say at Tycho Brahe or the work of the astronomer Jai Sing in Jaipur an Delhi. So it has that kind of design from the outside-in aspect and it does have an architecture of form which I utilise to capture the light and hold it, there by making a certain architecture of space.
I also pay attention to looking out from a space as in P.S.I Gallery’s ‘Meeting’ (1980-86, Long Island City, New York) so that there is not only accepting light in may be deeper space, but how the light is gathered as a quality when you are in the space and out of the space. So I’m trying to pay attention to those two qualities and in doing that in the outside form where architecture normally has it’s sense of style - I have nothing because that’s just the volcano."
This all seems to be of a piece with building surfboards to me–not watching certain rippers, but watching Yvon Chouinard on a wave at 67, or someone that is in tune.
http://www.boltcity.com/copper/copper_020_lull.htm
http://www.boltcity.com/copper/copper_004_waves.htm
Here’s one of my total kook attempts at wave art–
Hi llilibel
I’m in total awe of your work - I love the idea of surf related art but when I see it I generally find it too illustration based. I think it’s so difficult to catch a moment that you don’t truely have a good grasp of in your own mind. I mean you can’t really stand back and inspect the view when it’s happening. Expressing the moment is a true skill and your paintings have it. They move me and I’m sure others too. They capture things that anyone who hasn’t experienced the feeling of riding a wave couldn’t possibly understand. Well done they are amazing…I’d love one at home myself as all I can ever manage is the typical illustration!
Cheers
Richard
There is a definate “feeling” to your art.
Even more so, being away from the sea and producing what you did. That’s a good Jones.
Thanks for the inspiration and
“May God Take a Liken’ to Ya” –
-hobo Joe, after i gave him a buck-
llilibel and company,
Have you ever done a painting on a sanded hotcoat?
JSS