Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Publication Date: 2022
Texts by Jamie Brisick and Brian Lukacher. Contributions by Emily Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore
“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.
Pettibon is known for his characteristically enigmatic aesthetic and sharply satirical critiques of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic among the many motifs present in Pettibon’s oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985, Pettibon began his series of surfers and waves––which he continues to work on to this day––popular for depicting a lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty” along an impossibly large wave. This book spotlights a selection of more than one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon’s protagonist in these works, surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of the power of nature, what is beyond our control. Pettibon’s lyrical writings on these painted surfaces—both his own and lines taken from literature—reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality: he critiques and highlights the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the scholar Brian Lukacher explores art-historical antecedents in Pettibon’s work, particularly the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, and Jamie Brisick, the writer and former professional surfer, examines the Southern California surf and music culture of Pettibon’s youth. Professional big wave surfers Emi Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore also describe the sensory experience of conquering the enormous waves depicted in Pettibon’s works.
Details
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artist: Raymond Pettibon
Contributors: Jamie Brisick, Brian Lukacher, Emily Erickson, Stephanie Gilmore
Publication Date: 2022
ISBN: 9781644230350
Retail: $65 | $80 CAN | £45
Status: Available
Designer: Sarah Schrauwen
Printer: Conti Tipocolor, Florence
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 10.25 × 12.5 in | 26 × 31.8 cm
Pages: 208
Reproductions: 134 illustrations
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Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves
Artist and Contributors
Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon’s (b. 1957) influential oeuvre engages a wide spectrum of American iconography. Intermixing image and text, his drawings engage the visual rhetorics of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media as well as classic texts by writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman.
Jamie Brisick
Jamie Brisick’s books include Becoming Westerly: Surf Champion Peter Drouyn’s Transformation into Westerly Windina (2015), The Eighties at Echo Beach (2011), Have Board, Will Travel: The Definitive History of Surf, Skate, and Snow (2004), and We Approach Our Martinis with Such High Expectations (2002). His writings and photographs have appeared in The Surfer’s Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian. In 2008, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles.
Brian Lukacher
Brian Lukacher is a professor of art history at Vassar College. He is a scholar of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, architecture, and photography. His publications include the monograph Joseph Gandy: Architectural Visionary in Late Georgian England (2006), and he is a contributing author to 19th-Century Art: A Critical History (2019). His current projects include a volume on J. M. W. Turner and Romantic-period theories of vision and hallucination, and a study on animal perception in Pre-Raphaelite art and the writings of John Ruskin.
Emily Erickson
Emily Erickson is a second-generation big-wave surfer from the North Shore of Oahu. Her father, Roger, is a renowned big-wave pioneer and former North Shore lifeguard. Emily has forged a reputation for riding a variety of equipment on a variety of waves. She’s best known, however, for riding beautiful, hand-crafted single fins. She has chased swells all over the world, but is notorious for surfing her home breaks of Sunset Beach and Waimea Bay. Emily helped create history in 2019 as one of the first-ever female invitees to the prestigious Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational at Waimea Bay. She is winner of the 2019 Nelscott Reef Pro, a three-time finalist in the Women’s Big Wave invitational at Peahi Jaws, and a three-time XXL Awards Women’s Performer of the Year nominee. Competition has never been her focus, though. Emily simply loves being in the ocean.
Stephanie Gilmore
Undoubtedly one of the world’s most stylish surfers, Stephanie Gilmore entered the professional surfing scene in 2007, winning four of the eight events and claiming the WSL world title in her rookie year. She has dominated ever since, winning seven world titles so far. Stephanie spends her days away from the tour traveling the globe, exploring new waves, cities and beaches, photographing her adventures, and playing her many guitars. Stephanie led the World Surf League (WSL) to achieve gender pay equality, one of the first international sporting organizations to do so. She’s an advocate for ocean health and loves to spend time with the next generation of surfers at initiatives such as Rising Tides at WSL tour events. In July 2021, Stephanie represented Australia and surfing for its debut appearance in the Tokyo Olympic Games.
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