'Surf's Up!' Makes Splash at Art Center

Kowabunga! There’s a gnarly wave of surf-themed shows hitting the South Bay art scene this summer. Surf’s Up!—one of the inaugural shows at the Palos Verdes Art Center’s temporary location at the Promenade of the Peninsula—is the latest breaking.

It follows Art of the Surf, which rolled through Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach. (Art of the Surf ends with an auction benefiting the Surfrider Foundation on Friday, 6-9 p.m., at the Zask Gallery.)

Friday the surfer dudes and dudettes were rocking to the good vibrations of Hunch at the opening reception for Surf’s Up!, which runs at the former Borders location through Sept. 25. Lead singer Steve Shriver is a surfer and painter with works in both exhibitions. Most of the artists in Surf’s Up! are longtime surfers, and guest curator Jacqueline Dreager, a surfer and artist herself, rounded up some big kahunas of L.A. surf art for the show. The exhibit honors Bruce Milbury, a PVAC staff member and surfer, who died last year.

When an artist eyes a surfboard, he or she sees more than a ride. It’s a smooth, blank canvas waiting to be customized. Boards painted with scenes, splashed with color and covered with sculpted foam line the walls. Two are planted upright in sand mid-gallery.

Internationally known Los Angeles artist Sandow Birk’s Tempest, a large work on paper drawn and painted in sumi ink and shoe polish, shows a teetering oil rig spewing smoke and threatened by a stormy sea. Birk also contributed San Pedro, a drawing of a fully loaded container ship covering the bottom of a 6-foot surfboard.

Russell Crotty is known for his hanging globes covered with ink drawings. In Surf’s Up! he shows books of quick ink and watercolor impressions of seascapes with stick figures.

Anthony Friedkin’s artfully grainy black-and-white photographs, mainly from the 1970s, show weathered boards and waves in Malibu. In one shot the foreground waves are smoothed by a long exposure into dark, tapering, interlaced fingers while the distant shore remains in focus.

Twilight Latitude is by Venice artist Andy Moses, who has been working on a series of large canvases stretched over curved boards for a number of years. He marbles together various colors of iridescent paint into mainly horizontal swirls that suggest waves, shore and sky. The shape of the canvas means the light reflected off the paint changes as the viewer walks by, giving even more atmospheric and oceanic effects.

Shriver has two watercolors in the show: Foggy Night, a loose-limbed surfer silhouetted against a black sky by a splash of light and foam, and Lunada Inside Out, a wide panorama of cliffs seen through the curl of a wave.

Stephanie Ramer also takes curling waves as a subject. Her series of 5-by-7-inch oil pastels keep the sketchy texture of the pastels while capturing the waves’ inner glow in a variety of colors.

R. Nelson Parrish divides vertical surfboards into brightly colored and patterned horizontal bands of varying widths and coats them in glistening resin, a nod to the Finish Fetish school of art.

There’s plenty more to get viewers stoked. Surf’s Up! also includes paintings, photographs, posters and decorated surfboards by Doug Edge, Ned Evans, Stephen Robert Johns, Robin Lucca, Ana Osgood, Joni Sternbach, Rick Stich, John Severson, Mark Dean Veca, Alex Weinstein and Timothy Williams. Running concurrently is Enceladus, a solo show of semi-abstract paintings on canvas underpainted with copper leaf by Barry Markowitz.