Damian Fulton interview
When the Beach Boys conquered the charts with cheesy songs, surfing was in its golden age. But it has all changed according to artist Damian Fulton.
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HUCK: Line-ups that are dominated by terrifying locals, crowded beaches and a morbid urban surrounding - your paintings are everything but idyllic. Why don't you paint white sandy beaches, beautiful palm trees and perfect sunsets?
Damian Fulton: Because my world was never like this. As a kid growing up in suburbs of Orange County, my image of surfing consisted of the Beach Boys and their 'fun fun fun' message. But when I was old enough to ride my bike to the beach, I experienced something different to this. At Huntington Beach, no one was chilling in a hammock and playing the ukulele. Instead, I rode my bike in between motorcycle gangs, hippies and drug dealers. I didn't grow up on a tropical island but in the midst of a big city.
How does this influence your surfing?
In LA, you don't sit on the veranda, look out on the ocean and wait until the waves are peeling nicely. Here you have to think about so much more than only how good the waves are going to be. For example, you have to keep the traffic in mind if you don't want to get stuck in it for hours. Parking also is a hassle. When you're surfing, you have to fight your way through the water and guess what could happen next. You have to protect yourself and your board as far as possible. A surf session in LA is more like an obstacle course. Also the locals are a problem as they can make a nightmare out of a session when you are at the wrong spot. Overpopulation and surfing are a difficult combination.
You never wanted to move to another place where it's less crowded?
Sure but this town has so much to offer; the earthquakes, the violence, the fires, the crowds! Just kidding. I thought about moving to a less dense area but I also wanted to stay close to the beach. I don't want to move to Northern California with it's super cold water and sharks nor to Oregon where it rains all the time and you freeze without a 20mil wetsuit. I even thought about moving inland to a lake and learning to surf behind a boat but LA still is the best alternative for me.
In your paintings LA often looks like a surf version of Gotham City but instead of Batman, there is the surf...
My dad always said "you are living at the best place in the best country of the world." Back in the day, California was about freedom and infinite possibilities. But California is not doing so well anymore. The economy is down and unemployment high [...] Old, established families and businesses are moving elsewhere because they can't deal with the situation anymore. There are fast food chains, mass transportation, communication antennas and advertising everywhere. Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to live as a caveman [...] but we need to figure out our own way to co-exist with this world full of mass consumerism and over-stimulisation. Surfing is a perfect way to deal with this all as everything becomes unimportant for a moment when you paddle out. My surfers brave all for the privilege of a salt water baptism...
Damian Fulton's work is part of the Surf Art Festival which takes place July 7 - August 28 in Biarritz, France.
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Damian Fulton interview (text) by Melanie Schönthier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (5)
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"I figure no one is educated musically 'til they've heard that album" Paul McCartney