
Surfing is a big part of our life and our community. The passion and connection that a surfer has to the ocean and the waves is hard to understand unless you either are a surfer or you are married to a surfer. I am one who is married to a surfer, a really, really good surfer! Surfing is even a part of his job as an advertising art director for one of the top Surf clothing brands.
About nine and a half years ago we did this series of collages together and I recently asked him to find them so that I could post them here. These are significant for many reasons. First, this is when we began to use collage more freely as a part of our work. Second,this period of time in our life and marriage I was pregnant with our first child and we were fresh out of college, with an abundance of student loans and no solid careers (or even jobs) yet, just dreams. We did these pieces one night before an interview that my husband had at an ad agency.
This was before we had a computer and the raw tactile quality of these is so refreshing to me. I did the painted textures and the photo transfers, and he put the structures together and helped compose the collages. As you can see this is when I began using my junk mail envelopes in my collages, see this previous post to see what I am talking about. One of my favorite things in these collages are the bits of tattered and torn poster fragments layered in here and there. We had taken a trip to Paris that summer and came home with a bag of torn fragments of layers of posters that we had "aquired" while waiting
for the subway.
This was a great project for us and this helped my hubby get his job at the ad agency and it also helped me to get some jobs in the surf industry designing posters and t-shirts and some swimwear fabric.
I am so glad that we have our visual history in journals, sketchbooks and past art to look back and remember how we got to today.
I have recently launched a new sports brand of scrapbook paper (called SPORTS XTREME) it is just beginning to get into the stores this month. Surf and Skate are the first themes for this brand.
Although this type of work may seem like a huge departure from my pretty foil papers and butterfly stickers it really isnt that much of a jump for me considering my earlier roots swim/surf industry. Interesting how things cycle around, don't you think?