wolfgangblochmedia

Volume 16, number 5

Dark Renderings, a Wolfgang Bloch Portfolio

"There was the entirety of the surf experience; just a wave on the horizon, shrouded in profundity and purpose. Brooding, not bright."

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Dark Renderings, a Wolfgang Bloch Portfolio
By Brad Melekian

Frustration and an accident changed Wolfgang Bloch’s career in the early 2000s. He was at work in a small space he was subleasing from a flower shop in Laguna Canyon, dutifully painting what he calls a Pretty Surf Picture—white sand, blue water, palm trees, perfect wave. He had found success doing this—at least financially, could make some decent money plying the surf world this way—and had been at it for more than five years. It was a living. But something about this particular Pretty Surf Picture struck Wolfgang the wrong way. Vapid. Meaningless. Maybe he was just in a funk, but he reached over, took hold of a big brush, dipped into the nearest color available on his pallet and covered the canvas in broad strokes. He dipped again. Covered the canvas again in broad strokes. Two simple, expansive shades met at one horizontal point, and he thought he saw a wave where the two met, so he carefully, hesitantly, brought it out. There, on the horizon, was the entirety of the surf experience. It was just a wave on the horizon, shrouded not in beauty, but profundity, purpose. It was brooding, not bright.

In the studio, the arrangement that resulted caught Wolfgang’s eye. It was simple, evocative, powerful. But probably not much of anything. He left it on the easel, didn’t return to it, didn’t tell anybody about it, and went about his work. The next day, a friend came by—the same friend who had been helping him find outlets for his Pretty Surf Pictures—and saw the canvas. He remarked on the arrangement. Wolfgang filed that away. But it wasn’t until his wife came by and saw the work that he was willing to trust himself. “She’s my filter,” he says of his wife, Jennifer. “She has an eye and she told me right away that I was on to something.”

He refined the painting to a finished product, a piece of art unlike anything he’d ever done, unlike anything anybody was doing in the surf art world. The work was certainly beautiful, but it wasn’t pretty. An expansive stretch of beach more dared than invited a viewer. The foreboding horizon was more stormy afternoon King Lear surf session than day of tropical torpor. But there was an inherent truth to the piece.
Wolfgang produced one other piece in this mode and hung them both in a group art show at Laguna Beach’s “Surf Art Gallery” alongside work from a budding international contingent of surf artists. It was 2003. Surf art was coming out of its decades-long shiny-happy slumber. Surfer Magazine was producing an article on the new school of surf art and included the pieces.

With those frustrated, accidental strokes, Wolfgang Bloch went from freelance designer and Pretty Surf Picture painter to a bona-fide fine artist carrying out a distinctive artistic aesthetic. Wolfgang’s trademark style—a pulled-back interplay of ominous skies and foreboding horizons shadowing perfect surf—may have been the result of a happy accident, but it was now a coveted commodity.

When the piece hit, things were good. Orders came in, and commissions. People were willing to pay real-world money for some of Wolfgang’s creations. They would come to him, commission a piece in custom colorings, and he would recreate the same piece in a new arrangement. For a while, this was great for Wolfgang, who had previously earned his living doing freelance design for surf companies, and had most recently taken a load of work for Indian Motorcycles, selected to redesign their logo for the first time in a century. But when Indian went under, Wolfgang lost his steady work. He had a wife and a son and needed to hustle. The timing of the newfound interest in his work couldn’t have been better. For several years, he took commissions to paint the same picture, in new colors, over and over again. He was making a living as a painter, not a designer. He got so many requests for the same orange and grey creation that had launched his career that he had prints made, sold them on a website.
But the work grew to be almost intolerable.

“It was production work, after a point,” Wolfgang says. “I would sit down at my canvas and it would just be color theory. ‘Okay, which colors am I going to do this time?’ And I’d just bang it out.”

As a trained artist, Wolfgang could do this. With a master’s from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the new mode of work recalled to Wolfgang his old days of color theory courses. But it lacked the truth that had sparked the success in the first place. It lacked the sense of purity that had inspired him initially, a sense of purity that had become a lifelong pursuit.
He was born in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1963. He lived there until he was 18. Growing up, family outings to remote Ecuadorian outposts curried his first interactions with surfing. “In these places where we would go camping, there were big mills,” Wolfgang explains. “And the scraps of wood that the mill workers would leave behind were sort of rounded and shaped like a surfboard. My brothers and I would pick those up, take them down to the surf and ride them like Boogie boards.”
Surfing came late to Ecuador, but when a surf shop did open, and Wolfgang did get his own board at the age of 13—a used single fin—the hook was sunk. “You had a board, and you hung on to it,” he says. “You fixed it up and took care of it.” When he was 18, recently graduated from high school, Wolfgang took a sabbatical in the town of Engabao, in Ecuador, where he surfed through the day, keeping an unusually mindful eye on the way of life of the local fishermen. He tagged along with anglers who would go out before dawn, sometimes without outboards, paddling miles out to sea, no land in sight by the time the sun came up. When they returned with the day’s catch, their wives would have food prepared for them. Their hands were rough. They had only what they needed to survive. Wolfgang saw them as happy. He was drawn to the simplicity.

He longed for opportunity, though. He enrolled at a community college in Florida, near Tampa, and eventually transferred to the University of Florida. He thought he would study marine biology. His love for the ocean was profound, but the math and science courses were math and science courses, and it was difficult for him to keep pace. As an elective he took an art course, decided to pursue an art degree. He worked in basic skills, learned how to use new mediums, and learned artistic fundamentals. After graduation, and four years of Florida waves, he moved to California, enrolled at Art Center, and surfed as much as possible. He’d drive through the Kanan Canyon at night, wake up in his Volkswagen Bug on the side of the coast highway, surf until it was time to leave for class, and go to school. He lived in a Bohemian pad in South Pas with other Art Center students. The combination of surfing and creating art made for a magical year in his life.

On the other side of Art Center, however, he took a job doing design work for Gotcha. He did that for years before striking out on his own, taking a series of freelance gigs for his staple income, setting about to produce the Pretty Surf Pictures on the side, and had a good thing going.But the happy accident changed his career, and his focus.

Today, Wolfgang has struck out on a fine-art career, commanding impressive prices for a vastly evolving array of pieces. He has a studio that is at once decadent and workmanlike—a well-appointed 1800 square foot space that affords plenty of room to work, but one that is literally sandwiched between an auto body shop and a car wash. In the winter, it’s damnably cold. Tiny space heaters dot the concrete floors, but it does no good. Wolfgang has wrapped himself in layers of sweatshirts and long sleeves, sips from a steaming Venti, but the cold is pervasive.

Still, the studio speaks to his constant development as an artist. In the main space, equal parts lobby, front office and painting area, a ten-foot by five foot finished piece leans up against the wall. The piece does as much to typify Wolfgang’s new form as anything else in the studio. It is essentially a photograph of a large left-breaking wave, split into three panels. Below the wave are three smaller painted panels and framing the bottom of the piece is a good old-fashioned piece of wood—a 1x2. The entire work is covered in resin, which Wolfgang then meticulously sanded, etching in subtle patterns. He recalls being up late with the piece, being ready to leave his studio one night when he caught some irregularities in the sanding pattern. He broke out a supply of 400-grit and stayed up until 3 a.m. to fix an imperfection that nobody else would have noticed.

Wolfgang shies away from interpreting his art—isn’t much inclined to long-winded pretentious ramblings about his work’s possible meaning, but here’s a shot: This particular three-panel, left-breaking wave piece returns a viewer to the force of a wave, to the elemental power of the ocean, while reminding a viewer—through the scratches and the wood and the general workmanlike appeal of the whole, oversized creation—that surfing, and our interaction with the ocean, is a thing to be earned.
Similarly, Wolfgang’s studio space, which might be available by the time this prints, as he’s looking to purchase a new space—one with central heating, perhaps—reveals a keen eye, particular in relation to his fascination with found objects. While some artists go out and look for inspiration, Wolfgang goes out and finds it. Part of his workdays, when preparing, as he sometimes does, a glut of new pieces, are spent cruising the streets. He devotes a lot of time to construction sites. He says he always alerts the foreman of what he’s doing before he jumps in a dumpster and starts digging, but he does it nonetheless. Everything’s fair game. Movie posters, wood scraps, album covers, comic strips.

The net effect of this work is a palpable sense of possibility in his art. Everything can work. This December, Wolfgang hung a show at “The Surf Gallery” aptly titled Forgotten Beauty. Picking up what others had left behind, he rendered a certain loveliness. The remainders of the world at large had become his canvas.

The painting in these works bears a distinct resemblance to the simple, two-toned, lost horizon pieces he began with only a few meaningful years ago. Yet they betray a maturation as an artist. It’s the same mode, but a new medium. He’s proved himself incredibly effective, for instance, at utilizing wood in his pieces, most often to resemble exposed tidelines on the sand, or to effect the look of broad sweeps of windblown beach. He incorporates media—from cigar wrappers to photographs—seamlessly, naturally, lending a background to his wavescapes.

In many ways, this new mode is a culmination for Wolfgang, a coming together of the reaches of his career. One of the happiest times he can remember, he says, was when he had just left Gotcha. He was tired. Burned out. Design work in the industry, he says, can become monotonous, the designer reduced to a tool for executives who tread as though they too have a design background, barking out an endless amount of orders to “move it over here,” or “try it in yellow.” When he left, he worked for six months finishing furniture. He worked for a furniture builder who afforded him a lot of leeway in figuring out the relation between various woods and materials. He was working with his hands, surfing as much as possible, and the six month stint renewed in him a passion, both for work and for surfing. Soon he would be making a living painting full time.

His work today carries a reflection of that experience, much as it reveals the diversity of his background. His balanced training as an artist, his time exploring the fundamentals at the University of Florida and Art Center, his work in the prettier world of surf, his ability to fashion pieces by hand.

His oeuvre reveals a keen eye, and an ability to take disparate elements and incorporate them into one piece. His shop is appointed with the staple elements that are the artist’s stock in trade—canvases, easels, paints, etc.—but he’s also got a wood supply room, a cache of found objects, a workbench with a journeyman carpenter’s supply of tools. Today, he’s literally assembling pieces of art, as likely to apply a stroke with a brush as the blade of a circular saw.

Today, too, his life is lived in moderation. His personality seems to be equal parts ambition and temperance. He clearly is career-savvy and speaks of wanting to set his kids up for opportunity, an easily decipherable didactic turn that means he’s partly drawn to the not-ignoble goal of cashing in while it’s possible. But he is also conscious of the importance of being a father, of watching his children grow up. He avails himself of the freedom to turn down commissions that don’t intrigue him, even if that means turning down a fair bit of money, because he’s the father of two, and a devoted husband. He lives in Laguna Beach, and his career affords him the opportunity to pick his kids up for school, to coach his son’s soccer team. But when he’s working on a deadline, he works late, long, inspired hours. He drops out, emerging months later with a horde of new work.

Asked if he has designs on a career beyond the world of surf art, Wolfgang says yes, he sees himself moving out of the medium at some point. But just as soon, he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t see what he’s doing so much as surf art, just art. Surfing is something that happens naturally. If he’s going for anything in his art, he says, it’s that feeling when you jump on your board and begin paddling. What he doesn’t say is what you’re paddling toward. Always, on the horizon, a wave.

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