Iconic punk-era artist Raymond Pettibon’s new book “Point Break” hits surfing and waves, “His world is a messy, raunchy tangle between excitement and terror. For those who have been in serious water, it’s familiar.”

"When looking at a Pettibon, you get the sense that the ocean isn’t a playground but a compulsion, where the chance of drowning is very real."

JP Currie pushed me into trail running but it’s raining and I’m a baby. So I cracked open Raymond Pettibon’s new coffee table book Point Break.

It’s a doozy.

Blue-black waves with massive, braided lips about to crash down on tiny pen and ink surfer bodies. Deceivingly simple, reductive high school notebook doodles, dark and tense.

When looking at a Pettibon, you get the sense that the ocean isn’t a playground but a compulsion, where the chance of drowning is very real.
His world is a messy, raunchy tangle between excitement and terror.

For those who have been in serious water, it’s familiar.

All others, please wait in the foyer.

The book is accompanied by an essay form seven-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore and an interview with writer Jamie Brisick.
Pettibon tells him that “there’s two kinds of surfing. There’s big-wave surfing, and there’s the surfing that is changing out of your wetsuit in the parking lot, the kind of locker-room jock culture…

“Big-wave surfing separates oneself from the parking lot and flashing some Gidget, changing our of your trunks. In the lineup it’s between you and the wave―that separates the men from the boys, it separates Greg Noll from Fabian.

“I used to have dreams―almost nightmares―of waves when they were so big, and being caught inside and it’s like a washing machine, and as far as you can dive down, you can get your eyes full of sand and you’re still being tossed and turned…”

As if Severson went mad with honesty.

Drizzled onto Pettibon’s paintings are handwritten notes:

“Lived, loved, wasted, died. P.S. ― Surfed.”

“That would be the perfect wave, if there was not someone on it.”

“My road homewards lay through Waimea Bay.”

And my favorite, scrawled atop an image of a single, erect surfer taking the high-line on an impossibly steep right:

“What more could I have asked?”

But some are trickier to decipher:

“We let ourselves believe that we see a surface flatness there even as we pray for his soles. Borne forward mostly on the arms of in the curl of her kind nature alone. Born nekkid. There was really only one way to go.”

I’m too dull to get it and that’s why it’s worth staring at. Pettibon has long forgotten his censor.

His works try make sense of his experiences in the water. Sort of like Calvino meant when he said that dreamy thinking is “like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you can’t make anything.”

Pettibon’s bread is canvas and his ink spreads smooth, baby.

It’s tough to hang an event on your wall but Pettibon comes close.