Deceptively unassuming surfer one of the great contemporary sculptors and painters!

The surfer as artist is a familiar line. For some, it’s a fad to wash off the pharmaceutical fuzziness, others a life.

The art can be derivative and dreadful or as surprising (and as expensive) as a Wagyu beef burger served in a little wooden box and tied up with a ribbon. 

I’ve been collecting the work of surfer, and painter/sculptor/musician Jeff Raglus for a little past a decade. Collecting isn’t quite the right word. For a few years there I had a surplus of cash (two jobs, new biz) and wanted to buy art not for capital gain, which is what the savvy art collector chases, but work that pleased. Splashes of oil and inspiration I could stare and wonder at.

And one turned into three turned into five.

A few years back, Raglus hit me up and said he was selling one of his sculptures for two thousand dollars, a two hundred pound carving called Mr Pinky. Took two strong men (i.e. not me) to drag it into my house. I look at it now and it sinks me with happiness.

This short movie examines the life of a man who ranks among the most accomplished in the game, and who has avoided the frenzied fantasy life of money and the city.

Check out his kid too. Kasper. Artist. Musician. Real good surfer. Just like his old boy.

You’ll like this movie. Calming. Lovely.

At your favourite wave during the swell of the year?

Yesterday, a Little Avalon local, and by local I mean…local… drowned while surfing his favourite wave. LA Bob or Homeless Bob aka Bob Bevern was sixty-two and lived in a van on the clifftop overlooking the little Sydney reef after a divorce, a kid, lack of work and so on soaked up his cash reserves.

After a while, the low-cost breezy lifestyle grew upon him.

“I’ve been called crazy on a number of occasions,” he said in a featurette made last year. Bob described the joy of “laying back enveloped by the wave” and vowed to live next to the surf until he died.

Now, drowning ain’t pretty.

But neither is being eighty years old and living in a dementia ward, rattling around the corridors in a perpetual state of confusion or being eaten alive by cancer in front of your family, your final days, months, lived in a morphine haze.

Click, click, click. 

And the prologues to old age, as written by the author Mary Roach, “loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.”

How do you want to split this mortal coil?

Like Bob, at your favourite wave, during the swell of the year, your van still parked on the headland, full of your books, your clothes? Your memory still warm in people’s hearts?

Maybe hit by a White?

Or would you prefer the common end: hospital bed, muttering doctors, plastic tubes, toxic chemicals, fluorescent lights, before straight-lining and being sent to the ice box at the morgue and then prepped and readied for cremation?