Bomb Flow Cover Artist: Chris Lundy

Interview by: Todd Heath

I knew the second I started talking to Chris Lundy, there was someone special on the other end of the phone. I had just sent a shot-in-the-dark email to a guy I had never met or spoken with, and within five minutes I was shooting the shit with him like we’d known eachother for years. The conversation began like so: “Hey Todd this is Chris, I took a look at the Bomb Snow website and liked what I saw so I figured I’d pick up the phone and call you.”

 

It’s the non-chalant way Chris portrays himself and his art, even over the phone, that I really enjoyed. Lundy has spent the last 30 years of his life conquering massive waves, shaping awardwinning surfboards, and painting Michelangelo size canvases that will make your brain melt. To step into the realm of what this man is capable of not only on a surfboard, but on a higher level of perception, is truly a gift, and it’s an honor to show off his work.

 

I sincerely hope to meet this man in the flesh and talk with him over a fireside chat on the North Shore of Oahu, but until then, I will sit back with admiration and let Lundy’s words speak for themselves.

 

 

What was it like planting yourself on the North Shore? The surf and locals both have strong reputations. How did it go over and how did you break into the scene?

Well, I was just pretty wide eyed and in awe of it all. The North Shore was Mecca of the surfing world. It’s been attracting the most committed  surfers in the world for a long time, so I certainly had my antennas up. I’ve always treaded pretty lightly and been sensitive to what’s going on, so I never really had a problem. The people of Hawaii are very genuine and warm, but there’s been so much exploitation of the islands on so many levels, it’s not too hard to understand why anyone would be a little protective of their home. I was, however pretty hellbent on not missing out on anything, so bit by bit I made some inroads into some pretty tight lineups. I was building boards with some truly great surfers, so there’s a brotherhood and it spreads over time. There’s certainly no welcoming committee in the water, but it’s pretty much like that everywhere. I’ll put it this way. The North Shore’s still wild enough for someone to paddle out into the ocean somewhere and have an adventure worthy of an astronaut without stepping on someone else’s toes.

 

Describe your dream project if time and money were not issues:

To have access to a whole army of state of the art animators and technicians. To put this aesthetic into motion. The level to which animation has evolved just blows me away and I always have a craving to understand how it’s all done. I only let myself off the hook when the credits roll and it becomes apparent how many people are involved. The idea of designing and art directing even a small segment of a production at that level just sounds delicious to me.

 

 

Any life changing experiences you’ve had on or off the water?

I remember very clearly the moment when I was 9, after having done nothing but make Christmas ornaments during my first 2 weeks in Cub Scouts. I was standing in knee deep water at Siesta Beach in Florida, watching all these guys riding what were probably just about the crummiest little waves imaginable, but I saw it as the most cosmic thing in the universe and that was it right there. There was a magic carpet right in front of me. I bailed on the Cub Scouts, started surfing and everything worked out just fine.

There was one moment at art school where the lights turned on for me in a big way. In a drawing class taught by Burne Hogarth, the unquestionable guru of the Marvel Comics style of dynamic figure drawing and the artist who illustrated the original Tarzan strip for the New York Times, everyone was churning out rather stiff gesture drawings of 30 second poses, he began ranting in the booming voice that was so familiar in the Art Center College of Design hallways. “WRITE the figure you knuckleheads! Don’t draw it, damn it!! WRITE IT!!!!” The message was that the answer lies within your own natural movements and when you’re firing on all cylinders, your best work can pour out of you as fluidly as does your own handwriting. It’s that level of being automatic about it that is the atmosphere that will allow expression and art to emerge.

What else occupies your time besides art, music and surfing?

I enjoy keeping my eyes and ears open in general. There’s a lot going on in the world and in the universe for that matter. People push boundaries, make new discoveries and modern media puts it all right at our fingertips, so the whole concept of a little gel time to think about stuff, to recharge the batteries and take in some of the rest is fine by me.

Please sum up your philosophy on life:

Whatever it is that someone does, I just think it’s inspiring to look at it in the context of the big picture. To look way beyond the roles that are so often driven by how the numbers play out. To stare at the stars at night is a very humbling thing and a very inspiring thing too. To use painting as an example, there are those moments when it all clicks and some pretty complex things happen seemingly on their own, things you had been working around, but not quite addressing yet because it didn’t feel like the right time . . . and then boom, they all come together almost eerily and resolve at the same time. That’s when painting can feel almost musical, where it takes on a life of its own and you feel a bit as though you’re along for the ride, that you’re tapped into something bigger and mystical. Maybe you’re just a conduit for something much bigger and purely inconceivable. That part of it intrigues me and I don’t necessarily feel compelled to try to understand it or even give it a name.

Religion, politics, or beer?

Occasionally a cold beer, but I have a tendency to avoid discussing the other two . . .

At what time of day do you create your best work? Is there a routine to your creative genius?

Well the genius thing might be a bit of a stretch. I do pay attention though and get extremely focused. I allow myself to get completely consumed by it, and that takes me on an adventure because I’m not nearly as concerned with finishing a piece as much as I am about looking for ways to take it to another level. No particular time’s the best, but I like to have my work space set up and always ready to go. All that really amounts to is good lighting and having my paint palette all set up with a lid on it. I spend a lot of time looking at what I’m working on and that might amount to just a glance on my way to doing something else. I do have sort of a personal policy that if I see a move to make toward solving anything, I’ll do it right then and there as opposed to taking note of it and doing it later. If things are set up and ready to go, I’m in and focused at the drop of a hat.  Everything’s very clear that way and done at it’s most spontaneous moment. It has me working at pretty odd hours a lot of the time, middle of the night, first thing in the morning, times when I had been on my way to do something else, whenever . . . but it works as a process. All those moments add up, and there are thousands of them. It works well for the cause that every single thing was done at a moment when it was prime.

What do you think of the term surf art/surf artist? Do you consider yourself one?

People will always categorize to have a point of reference and there are a lot of presumptions that are already in place with the term “surf art”. As a genre it’s kind of an “insider” thing and for the general public the expectations are usually pretty predictable, but when taken into account the depth of intermingling the activities at very committed and intense levels over a lifetime, then it begins to hint at the possibility of a body of work manifesting from a somewhat meditative frame of mind. Maybe . . . and at that point it might be better to just leave it at “art”. When you really get into the guts of high end surfing, the forces at hand, the experiences to be had and scenery to take in are quite frankly beyond description. Allowing the activity of painting to predominate over the apparent subject at hand, in an expressionistic but very structured formal sense, opened a whole universe for me when I connected it to the other thing in my world that had me literally transfixed since I was a kid. It triggered an adventure rooted in something very real and intense, but is every bit as much about the raw act of painting as it is about anything else. It’s an exploration of my own movement and forms independent of any particular subject matter . . . and that actually includes in this case, surfing. That part of it is a given in my world. This aesthetic is a common thread that runs through other work I’ve done that has to do with musical sensations or capturing movement in all sorts of things and that in itself is very much about discovery. In the context of surfing, it’s a very deep one. To the core. The ocean is a place I’ve thrived in all my life and the water or a knowledge of it is actually the mechanism that organizes the paint into something else. I’m honestly still not quite sure what to call it, but whatever it is, it’s certainly the real thing.

 

 

I feel like your artwork captures the selfless beauty of a child’s mind. It’s uncontrived and surreal. Would you agree?

I’ve always been attracted to artwork that is visceral and which elicits some sense of emotional response just based on it’s gut level visual impact. Something that rings true down in the brain stem. That opens up the playing field in a very big way, but the common thread among successful art works is that they have a raw chunk of some kind of human spirit radiating out of them and it might not even be definable. Kids harness that beautifully and create really powerful vital paintings. They’re on that level of pure expression and it doesn’t even occur to them to bring other stuff into the process which would only serve to derail them from what they’re doing beautifully anyway. I recognize more all the time that the different things I do intermingle with each other. The whole universe of refining curves in the designing and building of surfboards has always come into play in my artwork and vice versa. Play is work and work is play. If you really love what you’re doing and it’s rooted into your life in a multitude of ways, then it only seems natural that you’d retain some level of childlike enjoyment in refining things. That’s easier said than done because as you learn more, it’s not necessarily as easy to keep things running blissfully on autopilot. You start thinking and analyzing and it can take a while to get to where all the new stuff is running on instinct and you can get back to having a pure experience again. Sometimes that can take a long while. What’s come to be with all  this stuff involved in my artwork is that there are elements here and there that have been getting tuned up since I was a kid. There’s a familiarity of curves and arcs that are every bit as rooted in the surfboards as they are in my drawing, so it’s only logical that somewhere here and there I’m gonna get that delicious stoke of a kid with a beautiful new board and all the experiences that’ll be tied to it. One place that does surface in just about everyone is in their signature. Most people have a well practiced artful little moment when they sign their name. That sense of expression in firing through those letter forms carries itself right on through to drawing and painting and music. That same sense of expression manifests in all sorts of things, Kelly Slater or Andy Irons signing their name all over the place at big Pipeline. Artful, improvisational inspired and powerful performances in the heaviest surf in the world. Not a single thing about it is contrived and it’s all fueled by amazing universal forces. It really is all linked together and the whole big picture continues to morph and evolve to unforeseen places, so it can be a very rewarding thing to delve into with a sense of adventure.

 

 

“To use painting as an example, there are those moments when it all clicks and some pretty complex things happen seemingly on their own, things you had been working around, but not quite addressing yet because it didn’t feel like the right time . . . and then boom, they all come together almost eerily and resolve at the same time. That’s when painting can feel almost musical, where it takes on a life of its own and you feel a bit as though you’re along for the ride, that you’re tapped into something bigger and mystical.” -Chris Lundy

 

 

To check out more of Chris Lundy’s awesome artwork, please check out: http://www.chrislundy.com/

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 12:02 am. It is filed under Art, Cover Artist, Surf / Kayak and tagged with CHRIS LUNDY, Chris Lundy surf artist, Hawaii, North Shore, Oahu, surf art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.