These JIVE t-shirts feature artwork that has been a part of my board building process since day one, and a part of my life since childhood.
What I’ve learned making art is it’s a practice in yielding. What am I yielding to?? It goes by many names, the Force, Source, God, etc. I am yielding to the energy of nature, allowing it to move through me and guide my movements.
The way the art comes into form depends on the lens through which it flows. In this case it flows through me, and me is a collection of my experiences in this life.
What have I experienced that bends this Light?
Childhood artistic expressions through drawing and painting initiated me into this process.
Teenage and early adulthood years drew me into mathematics, physics, and chemistry as I studied, and subsequently practiced engineering.
My late twenties catapulted onto an adventure sailing across oceans, diving deep into the mystical open spaces only the vast sea can offer.
Upon returning, building surfboards became the way that energy moved through me, continuing to today, and it was on the open canvas that a shaped surfboard offers that my art had space to evolve.
It is obvious now how one thing led to another, and the art is obviously a culmination of all of these experiences.
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Working as an engineer, I helped fabricate lasers. My job was drawing the two dimensional patterns that would be used to build the three dimensional structures that comprised the laser components on the semiconductor surface.
The phd engineers would give me the general dimensions, but I would draw them the way I wanted. I insisted on symmetry, concentric arcs, and pleasing curves. To differentiate between different aspects of the laser design, I would add color to the patterns. As long as they functioned as they should, I had free reign. And no one would ever see these designs, and even if you wanted to you’d have to use a microscope.
Drawing these designs in this way served no rational purpose. I wasn’t paid more to do it this way. The devices didn’t work any better. There was no reason to do this. So why was it even done? What inside me insisted that this happen? These designs lived a life authentically microscopic and unseen, anchored to silicon. Uninhibited by desires to be something other than pure artistic expression. Free of rational understanding.
This expression then travelled with a new structure. The surfboard. Anchored to a second functional surface, it continued to evolve, hanging onto the coattails of a proven craft. It lived a life as an auxiliary component riding shotgun to the demanding function of the surfboard.
So, now, having fully expressed that pure creative passion through previous incarnations, the art is free to fully come out on canvas. It is free to stand on its own.
The art is now free to move.