'Everything we did by hand and sandpaper,' said the Mavericks pioneer. 'The first one I did was a long board that I peeled all the fiberglass off of. Then I shaped it into a bullet '” wide, square tail and a pointed nose. It was very archaic, but it was a board I rode a lot.'
With ambitions to create the 'ultimate surfing experience,' Clark began crafting one board after another for himself and his friends. Years later, he earned high marks in the surf community for his signature 'gun' boards, which are modeled on the speed and curl of Mavericks waves. More than one-third of surfers invited to the 2008-2009 Mavericks Surf Contest sported the guns, he said.
 Hand-shaped surfboards created by Jeff Clark are displayed as admirers mingle at the opening reception for 'Pipeline: Art, Surfing, and the Ocean Environment,' showing through Aug. 28 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. |
'If anybody has ever taken the time to actually stand at the end of a shaping room while someone is shaping and designing a board, you'd see it's sculpting,' he said.
The six-week exhibition, which opened Thursday, is called 'Pipeline: Art, Surfing, and the Ocean Environment,' and features marine-related photographs, prints, paintings and mixed-media pieces alongside about 20 of Clark's psychedelic surfboards. The show's banner insinuates an intrinsic connection binding the three spheres together, says Maria Medua, Artists Gallery director.
'We're not going to tell you exactly what surfing is about. It's how those things come together viscerally and physically,' said Medua, who referenced the wear and distress of Clark's boards as highlighting that convergence.
The exhibition pushes the gallery's envelope, she added, in that it lends artistic credibility to experts outside art's conventional creative circle. The portrayal of surfers in the same context of artists is the exhibition's conceptual centerpiece, Medua said. The parallels are 'wonderful and undeniable,' she said.
That's old news to Clark, who has always considered himself, and his fellow shapers, artisans of their craft.
'Surfers look at surfboards as art,' he says.
Evidently, so do business owners.
Proprietors of ocean-themed restaurants and beachy surf shops from San Francisco to San Diego recognize Clark's reputation and talents, and pay top dollar to hang his boards on their walls and in their windows. On the Coastside, his boards occupy wall space at Half Moon Bay Brewing Co., the Ritz-Carlton, and Cypress Inn on Miramar Beach, among other venues.
Wipeout Bar and Grill at San Francisco's Pier 39 has kept one of Clark's long boards above the kitchen doorway for almost five years.
'It's a beauty,' said Bob Partrite, vice president of operations for Simco Restaurants, Wipeout's mother company, describing the board's lavish aesthetics. 'It just pops '- It's a piece of art, in my opinion. There's a lot of uniqueness in what (Clark) does.'
Clark, who refers to his boards as 'snowflakes,' carves his masterpieces from foam, balsa wood, redwood and, occasionally, washed up driftwood. His surfboards range in size from sleek, 6-foot 'Flying Fish' models to 11-foot long boards. He carves them locally, at his Princeton surf shop, and further south, near his glassers in San Diego.
That's where he is this week, working with a renewed enthusiasm on a new collectors edition line of boards. For his first project, Clark is sculpting a cypress log into a replica of an ancient Hawaiian long board, on which he plans to etch the names of individuals 'who have really changed the way we know Mavericks today,' he said.
His passion for crafting boards, he says, stems from being the boardsmith who enables surfers to catch waves that 'change one's perception of accomplishment and thrill' and inspire them 'to go places that no one's gone before.'
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