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by Kevin Cody
David Dickey was walking against traffic on the shoulder of the 405 Freeway in San Clemente. He had a wetsuit in his backpack and a surfboard under his arm. He was following a dirt path that swings under the 405 to some railroad trestles that have lent their names to one of his favorite Southern California surf spots. But Dickey wasn't thinking about Upper Trestles. He was thinking about Tahiti. If the Japanese deal came through, he'd have enough money for at least a year in the South Pacific, where he plans to surf and paint his dreams.
The 26-year-old has paid for past surf and painting trips - to Hawaii, Panama, Costa Rica, Barbados and Grenada - by waiting tables.
Now, he's looking at a six-figure deal with Black Gold, a Japanese surf company that owns 50 shops in Japan and eight in Hawaii. The company wants to display Iris prints of Dickey's paintings in all of its stores. Kolibri Digital Arts in Torrance makes the costly, serigraph-quality prints.
"Ever since my painting was stolen everything has just been falling into my lap," he said on the drive down to Trestles in his brown VW van. The trip was planned as a visit to his recently opened exhibit at the Huntington Beach Surf Museum. But since he had to drive all the way to Huntington from his Palos Verdes home, it only made sense to continue down the coast another 30 minutes to catch the afternoon glass-off at Trestles.
The stolen painting, titled, "Hole in the Head" was taken three years ago from a stairwell wall at the Palos Verdes Beach Club.
"What they did was grand theft. Someone risked his liberty for my painting. In a certain way, that's kind of cool," Dickey told the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Daily Breeze" when the papers reported on the theft.
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Artist David Dickey at his exhibit at the Huntington Beach Surf Museum |
The large acrylic painting showed a long, tubing wave against a sky reminiscent of Van Gogh's "Starry Night."
"You paint like Van Gogh would have painted if he surfed," a friend once told Dickey.
Maxfield Parrish is another artist whose influence appears evident in some of Dickey's paintings, particularly in the twilight sky of a long right-hander point break that Dickey was commissioned to paint for big wave rider and South Bay roofing company owner Paul Hugoboom. Viewers might also suspect Dickey of studying still another '60s favorite, MC Escher. In "Fire in the Sky," worms of contrasting blues magically merge up the face of a breaking wave before exploding in a spray of diamonds.
But Dickey had never heard of Parrish or Escher and had only a passing familiarity with Van Gogh, he disclosed after the stopover at the surf museum. He never took an art class because, he said, "School's not for me. Lots of people have said I should go to art school. But I'm afraid I'd end up not liking art."
A story in "Surfer" magazine about the theft of "Hole in the Head" led to an invitation to participate in a show of surf art at the Art Museum of South Texas, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Though he neglected to put prices on the paintings he exhibited, the mother of his friend Lance Brown, a chef at the 22nd St. Landing in San Pedro, saw a newspaper story about the show and offered him $2,100 for a painting.
"It was my first sale. It paid off the credit cards," Dickey said. The Texas show also elevated him to the company of better known surf artists such as Rick Griffin, another Palos Verdes native, and brought him to the attention of people who collect and promote surf art, such as "Surfer's Journal" publisher Steve Pezman.
The broader surf community learned about Dickey's art last year from a surf art contest sponsored by the surfing magazine "Transworld." A friend submitted a photograph of a surfboard Dickey had painted for him. It was awarded first place among 300 entries.
Dickey's paintings came to the attention of Black Gold when one of its representatives saw him at a surf trade show last year. Prints of Dickey's paintings were on display at the Lyndon Surfboard's booth, one of several surf companies that sponsor him. Others include a sunglasses manufacturer and Jalian, a clothing company owned by Dickey's Palos Verdes friend Alan Johnston.
In addition to commercial success, Dickey is making inroads into the world of fine art with a well received show last year at Sunyata Gallery in San Pedro and an upcoming show at the Don O'Melveny Gallery on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
Just three years ago, Dickey was giving away his paintings. "I didn't want to sell them because I didn't want painting to become work."
"My inspiration comes from wanting to get away from reality," he said, explaining why no people or evidence of people, not even trails or palapas, appears in his paintings.
"I don't dream of surfers. I dream of places where there aren't surfers. After the first surfer rides a wave, even if that person is you, the place, as a fantasy, is ruined," he said.
With his innate artistic ability, athletic looks and Palos Verdes upbringing, Dickey's unsought success suggest a life as idyllic as his paintings. And on the two-hour ride down to Trestles Dickey disclosed nothing to dispel that image.
As a child, he said, he pretended to be sick so he could stay home from school and videotape the "Jetsons" off the television. He would freeze frame the cartoon video and draw the characters. At age 8 his father introduced him to golf at the Los Verdes golf course. Dad had visions of his athletic son becoming a professional golfer. At 10, surfing lured him away from both golf and AYSO soccer. But he had grasped the basics of the two sports sufficiently to qualify for both the Palos Verdes High golf and soccer teams.
Academically he was the kind of student, his Lunada School teachers told his parents, could do very well, "if only he would stop doodling and apply himself." His sixth grade teacher phoned his mother one evening to say her son had earned a perfect score on the National Iowa test.
But the appearance of a privileged Palos Verdes upbringing notwithstanding, during the long drive home, after two hours of crowded, overhead Trestles' surf, Dickey disclosed the escapist drive behind his art.
His parents divorced when he was six, leaving his mother, a nurse, in a financial bind that put David on the free lunch program at school.
"I'd whisper to the cafeteria worker that I was on the free lunch program, and she'd shout out over the PA, 'Is the Dickey kid on free lunch?' It was embarrassing, particularly when all your friends are rich," he recalled.
Despite good grades, he struggled to keep up in school. "I was always the kid, when the teacher said, 'Time's up," who pleaded for just a few more minutes to finish the test."
His long hair and his surfer's attitude led to him being cut from the golf and soccer teams. And the only use he found in school for his art was at the end of the year when he signed his friends' yearbooks with psychedelic drawings.
"The day I graduated from Peninsula High School was the happiest day of my life," Dickey said. He spent the following year on Maui surfing and busing tables. Then he moved to San Clemente, where he surfed during the day and waited tables at the Ritz Carlton at night.
During this period a girlfriend gave him the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." In his entire life he had not read more than three books from start to finish. But as he flipped through this book, a description of dyslexia caught his eye. Until then, he had assumed printed words jumped around for everyone. Even when he signed his name to paintings he rarely wrote the letters sequentially. He would write Dvd and go back to add the missing letters.
Finally, he understood why he flunked algebra after getting the highest grade in the class in geometry.
Paintings of waves hang on the living room walls of the Palos Verdes Estates home where Dickey lives with his mother. The waves are as meticulously drafted and realistic as Dickey's are primitive and dreamlike. His mother painted the waves 25 years ago on visits she and her husband made to the beach with David, his younger sister Julie and his older brother Dan.
Dickey started working in oil and acrylics the year he graduated from high school, after chancing across his mother's old paints and canvases in their garage.
His studio is his bedroom. Paintings in various stages of completion are on easels, on the floor, stuffed behind the sliding door of his closet and under the bed. Dickey estimates he is working on 30 different paintings. He works standing, 10 to 16 hours a day with a brush and acrylics mixed with oils. Usually he starts with the sky, but sometimes with the wave. He never bothers to pencil sketch the scene on the canvas.
"I paint what I see in my mind. I paint waves because waves are what I love the most," he said. And then he admitted to the underlying contradiction that drives both the artist and the surfer. Both are escapists seeking an audience.
"I paint because we all die and all that's left is what we did and the feelings we leave people. I want some young surfer to see my art after I'm gone and be inspired to go somewhere," Dickey said as he eyed the cotton candy clouds of the right-hander point break that he is painting for his friend and fellow surfer Hugoboom.