SOME LOS ANGELES SURF BREAKS

In 2020, I cracked my head open on a rock while surfing in LA. My previous almost twenty years of experience had been over sand, not boulders. The surf wasn’t great in the area, but I had just moved and didn’t have the luxury of being able to move again. Could I prevent another accident if I memorized the ocean floor? Quite suddenly, I found myself compelled to draw reef breaks after a decade of portraiture. Thinking of Ed Rusha’s gas stations and swimming pools, I decided to navigate the tricky business of depicting notoriously localized surf breaks by removing their recognizable names.

For four years, I hiked to reef breaks near my house and drew them from life, in pigmented ink. As when I surfed these locations, when drawing them I rarely felt safe or welcome. I was once nearly kissed by a stranger at least 20 years older than me. I pretended to take a call to get out of there. Another time, after a storm, I sat in the water on my shortboard and could not see a single other human being on land or water. Out of nowhere, A shark looking piece of trash popped up at my elbow and I nearly had a heart attack. My last memorable experience surfing and drawing at one of these breaks, I hiked there in the dark, before sunrise, and was surprised to have the rare experience of finding myself alone during a decent swell. By the time I had paddled out, a row of men appeared on the cliff looking down at me. The wait for a wave was excruciating. I knew once another surfer joined me, I would likely never be allowed to ride a wave, not having been born there. Luckily a wave did come. It was long and glassy, allowing me to do three clean cut backs. When I looked back up at the cliff, all the men turned and walked away. No cheers or fist pumps or clapping. Neither did any of them suit up and paddle out either, though. The few, seemingly kind men I did meet could not name a single woman who had ever surfed there in their lifetimes. I was giddily told about the naked women who partied there on the beach with them, however. Awkward. I was also often shamed for changing into my wetsuit at my car instead of at the secluded water’s edge. While I understood this custom was, in theory, to keep the breaks secret, any hiker can see someone else hiking with a surfboard, wearing a wetsuit or not.

These stories might explain why my “in situ” sketches became meditative and expressive color field paintings once back in the studio, rather than completely naturalistic, plein air landscapes. My experience of these places was inextricably colored by the facts of my identity and previous lived experiences. 

The act of painting and sanding smooth shapes of vibrating color in the safety of my studio quieted my mind. So did animating the visual research I collected. Adding a computer chip to each of my paintings, I was able to connect every painting to months of hand-drawn animation, examining its corresponding location in time. In this way, these works became modern portraits of places––having identities both off- and online. 

Traditionally, as a commercial art, animation is drawn quickly, prioritizing the quantity of frames over the preciousness of a single frame. Being trained in laborious figurative life drawing rather than animation, I naturally wanted to do the opposite of this, and let myself. Spending at least ten hours on a single animation frame of water moving over rocks, I allowed myself to also indulge in an impulse to make a painting that “did”. I played with what it would be like if a painting could come alive. What could the few moments before and after that still image look like?

During this series, to make money, I was teaching a small surf camp for pre-teen Muslim girls in Huntington Beach. Somehow I sprained my knee. To recuperate, I had to use those thin, rubber, physical therapy bands. I made pink silicone casts of these bands and my hands as they gripped picture frames, in a gesture of outward presentation. I wreathed each of my multi-media paintings with the context of my personal perspective and body in that moment in time.