"They loved him because he made them look so good."

The reach of Art Brewer, who has died aged seventy-one, was astounding. He knew everybody, from Griffin to Stoner to Lopez, Rabbit, Curren, Slater, right on up to John John. And they loved him.

They may have fought with him a time or two, but they loved him—partly because he made them all look so damn good, and partly because he was another one of those free-swinging bullshit destroyers. 

True, he lacked the growling poetic eloquence of Flippy Hoffman.

But Art called ’em like he saw ’em, no two ways about it.

(This interview was recorded in 2014.)

Isn’t there a story about you and Rick Griffin driving up the coast to San Francisco?

He grabbed me and said, “Come on, I need a ride back home, let’s go.” This was 1969. He was living up there.  So I picked him up in my mom’s yellow Mustang. Rick was on LSD, but I didn’t know it at the time, and of course he wanted to drive, so next thing I know I’m in the passenger seat, driving through Big Sur. Rick’s girlfriend was in the car too. We get to San Francisco, he drops me off to stay with his girlfriend, then drives over to his house on Mission Street, to his wife and kid.

How old were you?

I was 18!

Wow, culture shock!

I met all the Zap Comix guys, Robert Williams and Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. That was a trip. And yeah, it’s the middle of the whole “free love” deal. So I end up getting some of that, and the crabs. I lasted three days up there, then got paranoid and split back home.

You and George Greenough were both kneeboarders. You ever surf with him?

I had one of those super-thin kneeboards, like an inch-and-a-half thick, all scooped out on the deck. I drove up to Rincon one afternoon and rode it, and George was in the water. He had it a lot more wired than I did, though. I watched and learned.

Did you ever talk photography with him?

Oh yeah, a few years later on. Quite a bit. A bunch of times when he was working on movies; Big Wednesday and things like that. Also, George built a waterhousing for John Severson, probably in early 1969, and that was the housing I used when I shot the Tom Stone cover.

What comes to mind when you look at shots of yours from the 1970s?

Just that the sport hadn’t been sold out yet. It hadn’t gone out the window.

When did it go out the window?

I don’t know. Photography-wise, digital maybe kind of ruined it. Sometime after 2000.

Surf photography has maybe gotten too good for its own good. 

It’s just so homogenized. Everything is smoothed over. All the colors are perfect.

That’s what I mean. It’s too perfect. It was more interesting when it wasn’t perfect. 

The Indian blanket.

What?

When they were weaving, Indians would always put a flaw in the blanket. You don’t want the blanket to be perfect. The world’s not perfect.

"A grand, explosive, creative talent."

Big, beautiful Art Brewer, the Californian photographer whose work defined surfing over five decades, and who created the legend of Bunker Spreckels via his ionic imagery, has died.

“Without all those incredible Brewer photos, we wouldn’t even be talking about Bunker Spreckels,” the surf historian Matt Warshaw told me a few years back. “Bunker in many ways was Art’s muse. He made Art a better photographer, helped bring out the genius.”

Art, who was seventy-one, had been in UCLA’s intensive care unit since July following a liver transplant. You’ll remember a couple of weeks back the GoFundMe that was set up to help cover his exorbitant medical bills; the first invoice he received was for quarter-of-a-million dollars despite being fully insured.

Referred to “as the sport’s most naturally gifted surf photographer”, Art owned the seventies, eighties and nineties in the American surf mags before splitting to do more lucrative commercial work, although his surf spirit still soared.

 

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But also: “Brewer’s eye for color and framing is unmatched in the surf world, and much of his best work has been done as a portraitist, when he has unfettered control over light, texture, and mood.”

The Hawaii-based photographer Brian Bielmann, another long-serving great, wrote,

And built in front of a wild A-frame called The Bomb!

You dream of splitting the big ol city with its two-million dollar shoebox apartments and acres of concrete and finding a piece of bucolic heaven, land cheap enough to get a spread where you can open a window and smell the ocean?

Three years ago, Daniel Serrano, a surfer and architect from San Sebastian in Spain, threw down $1500 on a Pastime Camper and hit the Pan-American Highway from Oregon, its beak pointed towards South America.

He found his little slice of surf-heaven in Aposentillo, Nicaragua, where a hard-breaking A-frame called The Boom breaks nine months of the year.

Serrano bought himself half-an-acre of dirt, parked his camper and built a traditional palm palapa shelter over it to stay dry during the raining season.

He figured he’d keep it as a “refuge” when he wasn’t back home in Spain, but with design work coming in, weeks turned into months and now he lives in Nicaragua for half the year.

And, so, that old Pastime Camper got turned into a 240-square foot modernist home.

“This cabin was built by two people using the most basic tools,” explains Serrano. “Through a system of sliding doors and windows that open with pulleys, the main space is able to open up to the landscape during the day and enclose to give privacy during the night. Interior and exterior distinctions are blurred allowing an engagement with the environment and at night it radiates like a lantern. The intention of the camper house is to explore the essentials for a magical holiday shelter within a small budget.”

Small budget?

Serrano says if you include the cost of the camper, buying and transporting materials, all his tools as well as cookware for the kitchen, so drive in jive away as they say, eight gees.

“I read books in the hammock on the terrace, do sunrise yoga, and eat well,” he tells Dwell, an architecture mag. “And score epic waves.”

Wild, yes?