Surf Art Catches a Break

When surfer and starving artist John Severson showed his work at a Laguna Beach gallery in 1955, his boldly colored abstract paintings of longboarders and the California coast didn’t exactly set the art world on fire.

Severson left as hungry as when he arrived, selling exactly one piece for a measly $35.

Half a century later, he returned to Laguna for two shows at the Surf Gallery on Coast Highway. This time, hundreds turned out for the opening receptions. Sushi and wine were served. Eager buyers snapped up scores of Severson’s oils and watercolors, some costing thousands of dollars.

Severson’s art had clearly arrived. So had the genre he pioneered.

During the last decade, a growing number of artists with roots in Southern California have found that surfing is their muse. What was once a hobby for surfers with a knack for painting has been building in popularity, fueled by affluent aficionados of the sport and an industry grown rich on the fat of the sand.

Collections of surf art have been making the rounds of museums across the country. Galleries dedicated to the genre are opening, and original paintings that were once ignored by collectors now command as much as $75,000.

“Surf art in the 1970s and 1980s was really slow business,” said Gordon T. McClelland, a Santa Ana art dealer, collector and historian. “In 1990, things started to take off. It’s gone from six or seven people painting with any consistency to more than 60 people today, probably more.”

Surf artists run the gamut of styles. They work in oils, watercolor and ink. Some print images using hand-carved wood blocks. Others create mixed-media works.

At its best, surf art conveys the “stoke” of the sport, the physical and mental euphoria that comes from a well-ridden wave.

Its practitioners connect with nature, capture coastal landmarks threatened by development and reflect romanticized rituals such as waxing boards or walking on endless, remote beaches.

“Every surf artist is trying to express ineffable qualities,” said Scott Hulet, an editor at the Surfer’s Journal who regularly writes reviews about the genre. “There’s van art, Woody art and perfectly airbrushed waves. Then you can go up the sophistication ladder as far as you want to climb.”

Although European and American artists have been capturing surf scenes for more than a century, it was Severson, the founder of Surfer Magazine in San Juan Capistrano, who popularized the genre.

He began painting surfers and beach scenes in the mid-1950s as an art student at Cal State Chico and Cal State Long Beach. Without a market for his art, Severson occasionally used his magazine as a showcase.

In 1963, he placed “Surf Bebop,” a bold abstract painting, on the cover. Lighted with bright shades of red, orange and yellow, the work depicts two surfers lounging on a beach with their boards on a hot summer day. It won national recognition and demonstrated that surf art could be fine art.

After 10 years as owner-publisher, Severson sold the magazine in 1970 and used the proceeds to paint full time.

“No one was banging down the doors back then,” said Severson, 72, who now lives on Maui. “The painting really started to kick in about 15 to 20 years ago. It has created a whole field of painters. Of course, we have now flooded the market.”

Like Severson, Wolfgang Bloch, 42, of Laguna Beach is an abstract artist. But his highly textured work often blends paint with scrap metal, matchboxes, wood, posters and photographs.

For a national Surfrider Foundation fundraiser last year in New York City, Bloch sawed a surfboard into pieces and assembled them like a mosaic inside a rectangular frame filled with translucent resin. The work is bisected by two thin, breaking waves in gleaming white.

Bloch, who headed art departments for surf-wear manufacturers and the Indian Motorcycle Co. before going out on his own, has been surfing since he was 12. His inspiration comes from the ocean and life along the California coast.

“It’s not typical surf art. I don’t do pictures of palms and perfect waves peeling,” Bloch said. “My work is more abstract, simplified. It’s more about imaginary landscapes created by color and texture. It’s something that just happens. I have an image in mind, but there is no conscious thinking or planning.”

Colleen Hanley of San Clemente, a former competitive surfer, is one of the few women in the field. Two months ago, she became the official artist for Surfing America, the sport’s national governing body. Her work will be used for promotions and sold to raise money.

“I was always drawing waves in class in high school. I’d envision the dream wave to get me through the day,” said Hanley, 28, whose bold abstracts of beaches and surfers fill the organization’s headquarters in San Juan Capistrano.

In contrast, the posters and paintings of Michael Cassidy of northern San Diego County are marked by a realistic style that faithfully depicts wahines, surfers riding massive waves and the tropical landscapes of Tahiti and Hawaii.

Other artists such as Kevin Short, Patrick Tobin, John Comer and Ken Auster bring to mind the California Impressionists of the early 1900s, who painted coastlines, canyons, deserts, mountains and rugged foothills.

“Those dead guys made it possible for us to make a living at this,” said Short, 45, of San Juan Capistrano.

So has the transformation of surfing from a sport of outcasts to a mainstream endeavor that supports an industry of surfboard manufacturers and sportswear companies.

At the same time, many of the kids who started surfing in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s have become affluent in middle age. They now have the cash to collect the trappings of their sport -- Woody station wagons, vintage surfboards and art that reflects their passion.

“For a long time, surf-related culture was just a throwaway thing. No one had any interest in collecting this material,” said Bolton Colburn, a former amateur surfing champion who directs the Laguna Art Museum.

From 2002 to 2005, Colburn helped assemble a collection of surf-related work and displayed it at the Laguna museum and venues nationwide, including Hawaii and New York City. The well-attended exhibition was a collage of cartoons, surf-movie posters, commercial art, sculpture, surfboard graphics and paintings.

“One of the most compelling things about surf art is that the really good artists capture the surf stoke,” said Allan Seymour of Capistrano Beach, a collector and dealer of high-end surf art and memorabilia. “That is why people buy it.”

Early works by Severson--some of the ones he had a hard time selling as a young man--now command prices of up to $20,000. Gallery prices for an oil painting by Tobin run as high as $8,400.

At the Surfrider event in October, a 12-foot surfboard that became a canvas for renowned artist Julian Schnabel sold at auction for $75,000. Originals by Rick Griffin, a former staff artist at Surfer Magazine whose vibrant psychedelic style was fostered by Severson, bring $15,000 to $25,000.

At the magazine, Griffin created the iconic Murphy character, a tanned surfer with a shock of blond hair and baggy swim trunks. He went on to create posters and album covers for rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Santana. He died in 1991 at age 47.

One of the best examples of Griffin’s work is owned by Jay Gould, a 52-year-old New Hampshire longboarder who has about 20 surf-inspired paintings and half a dozen pen-and-ink drawings related to the sport.

The painting is a 48-by-34-inch acrylic on Masonite. It depicts a caricature of the sun rising out of two green waves separated by a fetus in a womb. A dolphin surfs inside the curl of one wave just above a reclining nude woman. The work became the poster for “Pacific Vibrations,” the 1969 surf film produced by Severson.

Gould said he paid $15,000 for the painting in 1990 but would be unwilling to let it go for less than $100,000 -- that is, if he wanted to sell it.

“There’s the sun, the dolphin, the naked woman from the earth. She could be mother ocean,” Gould said. “It makes you feel close to nature, and you are having fun at the same time. The experience of being in the water comes through in a very powerful way.”

Griffin’s work also has left a strong impression on other painters, such as Short, who grew up reading Surfer Magazine and copying the late artist’s cartoons.

Short’s studio is upstairs at his San Juan Capistrano home. It is filled with posters, prints and oil paintings in various stages of production. Reggae music plays in the background.

“I don’t view my work as surf art,” said Short, who attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “It’s more a reflection of local culture. The coast is where I am, and that is what I paint.”

His work ranges from panoramic interpretations of Trestles, the famous surf spot in northern San Diego County, to the dilapidated Miramar Theatre in San Clemente, once a popular venue for surf movies. There are paintings of the giant palm in San Onofre’s parking lot, the Dana Point Headlands and Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison’s barn in San Juan Capistrano.

Harrison, who was one of California’s first surfers and whose wife is a descendant of the pioneering Yorba family, died in 1993 at 80. The barn, where Harrison stored his surfboards and gear, is still standing.

“Lorrin Harrison’s barn is on the old Yorba place. It has an outrigger canoe in front,” Short said.

“It tells you more about Orange County culture than most paintings of piers or Woodies at the beach.”

For almost 30 years, his friend Tobin found artistic inspiration living and surfing along the Pacific coast of Mexico from Mazatlan to Tehuantepec.

Tobin, who died Saturday at 55, chronicled his adventures in two limited-edition books filled with wood-block prints -- “Tehuantepec or Bust” and “Aqui no Mas (Here No More).” His studio was in the garage of his Aliso Viejo home.

Though Tobin amassed a varied portfolio and chafed at the surf-art label, much of his work is evocative of the Mexican tropics, with quiet villages, unspoiled coastline, emerald foliage and cantinas on the sand.

“I had the urge to paint the scenery that was all around me,” Tobin had said in an interview. “The people down there, their blood goes way back for hundreds of years, even thousands. The trees, too. I looked around and thought, ‘You know these trees have really seen a lot of stuff go down.’ You can feel it when you walk underneath them. And it got to me.”