This wordily wandering is in response to a ton of questions, mostly on social media, asking me if I still surf and how I got so deep into painting.
For those of you who don’t know, I have more than less segued from full-time surfer and part-time artist to the opposite. I paint all the time. I still try to surf when it’s right, but not full-time like throughout my entire life up to this point. Here is the story behind this life change for me.
I have surfed my entire life and have been lucky enough to have been able to do it on a daily basis from the time I was a young kid to just recently. I have done art, off and on, since I was in high school and liked watercolors. But never all that seriously.
In the 1980s, I got into doing airbrush paintings, I sold them through a gallery in Dana Point Harbor and they did well. I had a little spot in the back warehouse at SURFER magazine where I could do these. I was working there at the time. When I left, I didn’t have a place to do them anymore, so I stopped.
In the early 2000s, I built a house on the beach in mainland Mexico and started a business taking in surfing guests. One of these was an artist who did acrylics. When he left, he gave me a small acrylic set and I tried out a few paintings to see how I liked it. It was fun, and I started doing a few simple ones.
I put them on the wall, and people started asking to buy them. It became a side hobby to go along with the surfing and music (was still doing some gigs there in the local area.).
In the fall, just before the coronavirus hit, I got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, or AFib. This led to a number of surgeries and a pacemaker. Also a tremendous drop in energy level.
I started to get very out of breath when I surfed and my heart rate would get very high. Then COVID-19 hit and I wound up spending about six months in the house, not surfing, and doing nothing but gaining weight. When I finally got back in the water, I found I…
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