2023 Surf Art Calendar
December
“Pastel Shredder”
By: Fritz Chesnut
STORY BEHIND THE IMAGE
From the artist: I grew up surfing in the Santa Barbara area. The ocean was my first connection to the great sublime; a vast container of storms that could also produce flawless surf. My work stems from a fascination with the interplay of order and chaos. My painting, Pastel Shredder is a process oriented artwork that’s formed by gravity pulling a skin of dried paint over a wet layer, analogous to the way water shapes the surface of land on earth.
PERSONAL CONNECTION
The story of how I met Fritz Chesnut is the story of my life… random. It was the summer of 2022 and the waves out front at my local break in Manhattan Beach were small, but fun with a couple of 3-4ft peaks coming through. What you have to understand is that the crew at 32nd Street is the same pretty much every day, so to see someone else navigating the line-up and catching set waves is unique. On this day, I notice a guy I haven’t seen before with good style & smart positioning catching waves. Then a few days later I see this same guy in the water, doing the same thing and we end up sitting next to each other waiting for the next set wave. So, I do what any normal person does and strike up a conversation with him. Turns out that he’s an artist and good friends with fellow surf calendar artist Alex Weinstein… I tell him all about my Surf Calendar project and boom, he’s in for 2023.
What I love about this piece is the organic feel to it. The overall aesthetic conveys a feeling of calm, similar to the focus it takes to ride waves. Keep an eye out for a feature article written about Fritz in an upcoming quarterly surf publication and find out more on IG @fritzchesnutstudio
ARTIST BIO
Fritz Chesnut was born in 1973 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995 and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 1997. He has had solo exhibitions at AF Projects, There-There and C. Nichols Project, (Los Angeles), Country Club, (Los Angeles and Cincinnati), CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, (San Francisco) and Bellwether Gallery, (New York). His work has been seen in such venues as LAXART, Los Angeles, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, Pepin-Moore, Los Angeles, White Columns, New York, The Bronx Museum, New York, and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, among many others.
