Examine the finless wizard's wild trajectory from
fundamentalist Christianity to sexy-as-all-hell art and surf.
“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the
social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse,
and succeeds?” Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.
The artist, brown-skinned and barefoot like everyone else in
this neighbourhood, wears blue jeans and a matching shirt
unbuttoned three deep as he pads through the beachfront
apartment that serves as studio and living quarters, three
commissions in various stages of completion leaning against the
kitchen wall.
Readying for delivery are “Non Cheri”, four feet by five, white
stars on a rose background, words in Marlboro’s familiar serif
font, three thousand dollars; “As the Sun Sets”, six feet by
two-and-a-half feet, palm trees, rodeo cowboy, ‘Au Coucher Du
Soleil” in French, seven thousand dollars; “Cowboy Love”, three
feet by two-and-a-half feet, torso and head outline of a cowboy,
‘L’amore Cow-Boy’ in French, three gees.
Jacob Leigh Pedrana, artist handle Jakey Pedro has, in a perfect
flurry of oil and canvas and red wine-fuelled inspiration,
transmogrified from blue-collar plasterer to in-demand artist whose
joyously coloured rodeo cowboy-themed works festooned with French
idioms are the latest must-have for Australia’s culturally
well-heeled set.
Thick worker’s hands that once gripped hammers and banged
drywall on the dawn-to-dusk building site grind are now employed
delicately wielding brushes and paint sticks.
“It’s hard to explain how quickly it all happened,” says
thirty-eight-year-old Jake, who reconnected with the art that
consumed him as a kid during 2020’s pandemic. “It’s like I’ve been
given this new life. It’s like being reborn.”
When the Big Scare hit and
Australians dutifully locked their doors and shuttered their
windows for the year, Jake bought a dozen bottles of red wine,
rolls of paper, a box of pens and, after his then-three-year-old
kid Ryka was asleep in bed, spent his nights painting whatever came
to him, posting
the results on his Instagram story.
People would ask him if the work was for sale and with his trade
shuttered for the foreseeable future and down and out in a part of
town where even a modest attached home sells for two million
dollars, Jake was introduced to the concept of art as
bullion.
His first piece, a small abstract on paper sold for four-hundred
dollars.
A commission came from Hawaii via DM for a six-foot-by-six-foot
“dinosaur moonscape” and Jake, who ain’t short of confidence,
quoted the man eight-thousand dollars for the work. Within an hour
his PayPal account was inflated to an hitherto unknown
high.
And that, as they say, was that.
Jake used the eight gees to buy oil paints and oil sticks and
tossed away his cheap chainstore tools, and the commissions haven’t
stopped, the pace quickening week by week, myriad exhibitions
sought by galleries, restaurants ordering murals.
His surf clothing sponsor, The Critical Slide
Society, even released a limited edition trunk, the
pink fabric garlanded with his trademark rodeo cowboy.
Jake says his sudden ability to survive just from sales of his
paintings, feels like a gift from God, but is quick to clarify he
means kismet or providence, and not the the Christian concept of
God which was belted out of him after being raised in a Pentecostal
household.
“I saw some weird shit at Church when I was a kid,” he says.
“Church attracts people who are really hurting and I didn’t know
that. I thought Church was really kind. I saw a lot of dark
things.”
Dark? Yeah, like the time he and the pastor’s kid were hiding in
the Church office and he watched as donations suckered from the
flock for a flood in Samoa were divvied up between the Church
officials, the men laughing at how much money they’d
made.
“I felt sick,” says Jake.
**********
Above the six-feet-and-two-inch artist’s head, which pivots
on a light heavyweight’s two-hundred pound frame dramatised by
excessively broad shoulders, are two finless wooden alaia-style
boards.
Jake shaped ‘em using hand tools and carved from
Paulownia tree blanks sent from Noosa by old friend and shaping
mentor Tom Wegener.
Readers may remember Tom as the Joker from Phil Jarratt’s 2006
(Alex: can you check it’s issue 14:1) Journal profile of the Palos
Verdes-raised former lawyer who threw in the cash-grab to live in
blissful harmony shaping ancient surfboards at Noosa Heads.
Jake, a bodyboarder of renown whose drop-knee wizardry had taken
him to the Australian Titles, was born in the hills out behind
Noosa and on a trip home in 2007 became fascinated with Wegener’s
alaias.
This was a decade after bodyboarding’s spectacular nineties peak
when Encinitas drop-knee king Paul Roach had turned Machado and his
Momentum pals onto trailsides, a time when Tom Morey’s squared-off
pieces of foam looked set to overtake trad fibreglass board
surfing.
By 2007, however, the magic had faded and bodyboarders had
started turning to stand-up surfing and its
alternatives.
The trip home coincided with Wegener being filmed for a vignette
in the Thomas Campbell film The Present, the smiling Californian
with the mild, defenceless eyes of a lamb living the Country Soul
dream of shaping wooden boards out the back of his little shack.
And it was the shredding of one of Wegener’s team riders, Jacob
Struth on these little wooden boards that
just…hit…Jake.
In short order, Jake struck up a conversation with Wegener at
National Park during a swell, and after riding an alaia at the
famous points, told him he wanted to shape and create his own
versions.
“I got up straight away, it felt natural and didn’t feel one bit
weird. I wanted to be involved in it, heavy involved,” says Jake.
“You gotta swim the alaias, they don’t float, you’re literally
swimming the whole time. It’s like wakeboarding, you have to get
‘em up on the plane but once you’re going, you’re
fucking…on.”
By 201o, the pair were collaborating on a mass-production alaia
that was accessible to average surfers.
“The ancient alaias, they’re great to ride but they’re
physically demanding – only one in one thousand surfers can
actually ride one,” says Wegener, who is now fifty-eight. “We
thought, is there a way to take this really elegant, difficult type
of surfing and bring it to the masses so other people can get
turned onto the glide of ancient surfing? Ancient surfing is
finless surfing and the ancients were very, very good at
surfing.”
The pair worked to find a shape that kept the essential being of
the alaia, the basic tombstone shape with a slight parabolic rail
towards the tail, that didn’t require its operator to be
superhuman.
“I knew how a bodyboard flexed so we worked well together,” says
Jake.
The result was the Albacore, a finless board available as a
4’11” or a 5’6” and made from flexible foam that sold for two
hundred dollars a piece via Global Surf Industries, at one point
the biggest surfboard manufacturer in the world.
Marketed as “a simple finless board that is complimenting the
craze of finless surfing, with a safe, user friendly way of getting
a piece of this type of surfing”, the Albacore sold well enough
but, says Wegener, “didn’t light the world on fire.”
Wegener says GSI impressed him with their desire to “advance
surfing by taking on different projects”. The project, he says, was
stymied by distributors who needed surfboards that were a
guaranteed sell.
Which meant the wildly eccentric Albacore, even with its surf
bonafides demonstrated to devastating effect by Jake at a Javanese
slab and at Fiji’s Cloudbreak, wasn’t even visible to the average
surfer.
“The Albacore was very easy to surf for a snowboarder and so the
few Albacores that went to Europe, the guys loved ‘em,” says
Wegener. “They’re no different to a snowboard…it’s still a very
relevant idea.”
GSI were so thrilled with Jake’s involvement in the project he
became a team rider, the company viewing him as a surf unicorn,
that rare shredder who can articulate feeling from a surf
craft, whether it’s a bodyboard, a noserider or a lip-swatting
five-six.
A dozen years after the fact, Wegener is still elevated when he
describes sitting on the beach at Noosa on Christmas Day 2011
watching Jake impose his unique lines.
“He’s the best backside finless surfer I’ve ever seen,” says
Wegener. “He was going down the point doing off the lips but 360
off the lips, one after the other…backside… drifting
across the lip 360s, engaging the rail, doing another 360. It was
so breathtakingly beautiful. Of course, I didn’t have my camera
that particular day. You’ve never see anything like
it.”
**********
If you want to talk about the influences that shaped Jake and
his rodeo cowboys, think of those artists that emerged at various
points in the twentieth century to storm the citadels of
tradition – the Pop Art of Warhol, Picasso’s Cubism,
Wassily Kandinsky and Abstraction, Matisse and Fauvism, Basquiat
and Schnabel’s brute primitivism.
Schnabel’s work produced outdoors in Mexico, his velvet
canvasses spread out in the dirt, in particular, sung to
Jake.
“He’s a surfer as well and I loved that he used to paint huge
scale paintings right on the beach. He’d go down to Mex, paint on
the beach right there and do the coolest
installations.”
More than Schnabel or the obvious parallels to Basquiat’s
brightly coloured and frenetic graffiti style, Jake says it’s
surfing that inspires.
“Even though I don’t surf much anymore, a few times a week, and
as corny as it
sounds, surfing is an art form. I’ve taken that feeling of being
the artist in the water and putting in on canvas. They both help
each other. Surfing helps my art and art helps my surfing. Not just
wine.”
The cowboy motif reappears because of Jake’s upbringing a
forty-five minute drive from the beach.
“I was a surf cowboy,” he laughs.
Before he paints, Jake will buy a twenty-dollar bottle of Pinot
Noir and mix the colours, combing an oil base through a dry pigment
to create washed-out pastels and washed-out fluoro colours for what
he describes as an early nineties feel.
“Soft pastel pinks and light blues because when you put a big
black oil stick over the top of a bright colour it
pops.”
Jake wants pop because the feeling the artist wants you to
experience is lightness.
“I look at some art and it makes me feel heavy,
which is the artist’s inner being brought onto the canvas. I don’t
make confronting, in-your-face art. It’s not dark although painting
is my therapy and me being creative forces and sharpens my focus
which might, and does, deviate elsewhere.”
When Jake separated from the mother of his son Ryka in 2018 when
the kid was one it was an added motivations to aim his light at
that fabled north star.
“I wanted to break that pattern of traditionalism that I was
born into, the working class ideal where you’re forced to work for
the man, the company, whatever. My gift to Ryka is to show him you
can love what you do. I didn’t want him to see me miserable as a
plasterer.”
Wegener says he finds it difficult to describe the happiness he
feels seeing his protege killing it on the art scene.
“The sheet-plasterer guy, doing that, it didn’t suit him. He’s a
very, very special person. He’s so much more. He senses more, he
has a heightened awareness. Him and his son Ryka, what a team they
are. It’s a buzz to see him painting with the kid in between his
legs doing his own painting. And that’s the great quality Jake has.
It’s a super empathy that he feels with people. And it comes
through in his surfing and his art.”
(Editor’s note: This story first appeared in The
Surfer’s Journal, Volume 32, issue 5. See Jake’s work
here.)
