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I grew up in Santa Cruz with men who looked like Robert Redford, all square jaws and golden-haired forearms and muscled calves. Sure, they might be talking about waves, but they are also talking about other things you might not expect. They might mumble to a buddy about Truffaut or reference the latest Joan Didion essay. One guy is a potter, one’s a screenwriter, another an English professor who founded the Charles Dickens Festival at the university. The most cerebral one is a board shaper. If you get close, this man smells of the ocean. His skin bears the unmistakable stamp of a relentless, reflected sun. He has blue collar hands with calluses that know how to peck at a typewriter. Yeah, he met Stewart Brand (founder of The Whole Earth Catalog) a few years back at a party in Menlo Park and introduced him to some builder friends who fabricate geodesic domes up in the Santa Cruz mountains. This specimen of masculinity is angular and tells arch jokes to kids like, “Did you hear that Willie Nelson got run over by a car? He was playing on the road again,” and has a bookshelf full of abalone shells and novels written by his old buddies from years lived abroad. He uses words like “lugubrious” and constructed a zipline in the back yard for his kids. He likes beautiful women, but only if they’re interesting. He has an annual mussel-hunting party on a secret beach up the coast. He can build a perfect driftwood bonfire and poach a salmon. He makes men from inland areas look wimpy.
Over the past few years I have been working out the nuances of the men I grew up around. I’ve created a series of watercolors, approximating the many moods of the Pacific Ocean, paired with a little koan about these watermen-adventurer-reader-creatives. Below are a few — all are for purchase in my online Studio Shop.