Surfboard

The feeling I love when I touch finely honed alabaster is exactly the same as the wax on my early work which was a process called encaustic. For a more permanent layer over my oil painting I wanted to investigate matte resins so I contacted the legendary surfboard shaper, Tim Bessell in La Jolla. We experimented with one of my oil painted samples and it was a science project gone bust. It turns out that oil and resins don’t play nicely. The solution was to have the photographed painting printed on fiberglass fabric and fused to the board so the idea was born to make an actual surfboard. The results were so gorgeous.

There was more fuel for that idea when a good friend, Fernando Aguirre, had successfully lobbied to have surfing included in the Olympic games and Tokyo would be the first. I went to work painting a piece to be used on a board that I felt embodied what the games represent as unity, love for the water, and all that could be obtained when cultures play together. Street graffiti in Paris had the words Teach Peace which were translated into Kanji and among other images, I painted the image of John Lennon that I had seen on a wall with the title of his song, Imagine. While our lobbying with the Lennon folks wasn’t successful for that image to be included on future boards, this one is a unique example of what happens when we dream big.