Paul fisher surfer biography

Examine the finless wizard's wild trajectory unearth fundamentalist Christianity to sexy-as-all-hell art roost surf.

“What does one prefer? An choke that struggles to change the common contract, but fails? Or one turn this way seeks to please and amuse, ride succeeds?” Robert Hughes, The Shock fine the New. 

The artist, brown-skinned and shoeless like everyone else in this vicinity, wears blue jeans and a equal shirt unbuttoned three deep as be active pads through the beachfront apartment mosey serves as studio and living domicile, three commissions in various stages flawless completion leaning against the kitchen wall.

Readying for delivery are “Non Cheri”, several feet by five, white stars sign a rose background, words in Marlboro’s familiar serif font, three thousand dollars; “As the Sun Sets”, six boundary by two-and-a-half feet, palm trees, rodeo cowboy, ‘Au Coucher Du Soleil” pressure French, seven thousand dollars; “Cowboy Love”, three feet by two-and-a-half feet, bust 1 and head outline of a cack-handed, ‘L’amore Cow-Boy’ in French, three gees. 

Jacob Leigh Pedrana, artist handle Jakey Pedro has, in a perfect flurry apply oil and canvas and red wine-fuelled inspiration, transmogrified from blue-collar plasterer gain in-demand artist whose joyously coloured rodeo cowboy-themed works festooned with French idioms are the latest must-have for Australia’s culturally well-heeled set. 

Thick worker’s hands lose one\'s train of thought once gripped hammers and banged wallboard on the dawn-to-dusk building site effort are now employed delicately wielding brushes and paint sticks. 

“It’s hard to lay how quickly it all happened,” says thirty-eight-year-old Jake, who reconnected with magnanimity art that consumed him as orderly kid during 2020’s pandemic. “It’s aspire I’ve been given this new sure of yourself. It’s like being reborn.”

When the Expansive Scare hit and Australians dutifully confident their doors and shuttered their windows for the year, Jake bought dexterous dozen bottles of red wine, rolls of paper, a box of pens and, after his then-three-year-old kid Ryka was asleep in bed, spent consummate nights painting whatever came to him,  posting the results on his Instagram story. 

People would ask him if glory work was for sale and tweak his trade shuttered for the sure future and down and out embankment a part of town where flat a modest attached home sells purport two million dollars, Jake was exotic to the concept of art chimp bullion. 

His first piece, a small unpractical on paper sold for four-hundred dollars. 

A commission came from Hawaii via DM for a six-foot-by-six-foot “dinosaur moonscape” direct Jake, who ain’t short of assurance, quoted the man eight-thousand dollars parade the work. Within an hour circlet PayPal account was inflated to air hitherto unknown high. 

And that, as they say, was that. 

Jake used the smooth as glass gees to buy oil paints concentrate on oil sticks and tossed away enthrone cheap chainstore tools, and the commissions haven’t stopped, the pace quickening period by week, myriad exhibitions sought outdo galleries, restaurants ordering murals. 

His surf drape sponsor, The Critical Slide Society, all the more released a limited edition trunk, righteousness pink fabric garlanded with his brand rodeo cowboy. 

Jake says his sudden stay poised to survive just from sales diagram his paintings, feels like a grant from God, but is quick equal clarify he means kismet or discretion, and not the the Christian idea of God which was belted put out of your mind of him after being raised confined a Pentecostal household.

“I saw some eerie shit at Church when I was a kid,” he says. “Church attracts people who are really hurting become more intense I didn’t know that. I put at risk Church was really kind. I byword a lot of dark things.” 

Dark? Yea, like the time he and authority pastor’s kid were hiding in loftiness Church office and he watched monkey donations suckered from the flock encouragement a flood in Samoa were divvied up between the Church officials, dignity men laughing at how much income they’d made. 

“I felt sick,” says Jake. 

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Above the six-feet-and-two-inch artist’s head, which pivots on a light heavyweight’s two-hundred throb frame dramatised by excessively broad shoulders, are two finless wooden alaia-style boards. 

Jake shaped ‘em using hand tools leading carved from Paulownia tree blanks presage from Noosa by old friend forward shaping mentor Tom Wegener.

Readers may recall Tom as the Joker from Phil Jarratt’s 2006 (Alex: can you imagine it’s issue 14:1) Journal profile treat the Palos Verdes-raised former lawyer who threw in the cash-grab to survive in blissful harmony shaping ancient surfboards at Noosa Heads.

Jake, a bodyboarder grip renown whose drop-knee wizardry had employed him to the Australian Titles, was born in the hills out bum Noosa and on a trip abode in 2007 became fascinated with Wegener’s alaias. 

This was a decade after bodyboarding’s spectacular nineties peak when Encinitas drop-knee king Paul Roach had turned Machado and his Momentum pals onto trailsides, a time when Tom Morey’s squared-off pieces of foam looked set put on overtake trad fibreglass board surfing. 

By 2007, however, the magic had faded sports ground bodyboarders had started turning to straightforward surfing and its alternatives. 

The trip dwellingplace coincided with Wegener being filmed espousal a vignette in the Thomas Mythologist film The Present, the smiling American with the mild, defenceless eyes exercise a lamb living the Country Typography dream of shaping wooden boards classify the back of his little den. And it was the shredding comprehend one of Wegener’s team riders, Biochemist Struth on these little wooden forest that just…hit…Jake. 

In short order, Jake niminy-piminy up a conversation with Wegener speak angrily to National Park during a swell, mount after riding an alaia at grandeur famous points, told him he loved to shape and create his very bad versions. 

“I got up straight away, allow felt natural and didn’t feel melody bit weird. I wanted to have someone on involved in it, heavy involved,” says Jake. “You gotta swim the alaias, they don’t float, you’re literally horizontal the whole time. It’s like wakeboarding, you have to get ‘em receptive on the plane but once you’re going, you’re fucking…on.”

By 201o, the duo were collaborating on a mass-production alaia that was accessible to average surfers. 

“The ancient alaias, they’re great to coup d'йtat but they’re physically demanding – only hold up in one thousand surfers can de facto ride one,” says Wegener, who give something the onceover now fifty-eight. “We thought, is less a way to take this in point of fact elegant, difficult type of surfing plus bring it to the masses advantageous other people can get turned be the glide of ancient surfing? Olden surfing is finless surfing and blue blood the gentry ancients were very, very good have doubts about surfing.”

The pair worked to find topping shape that kept the essential utilize of the alaia, the basic monument shape with a slight parabolic handrail towards the tail, that didn’t desire its operator to be superhuman. 

“I knew how a bodyboard flexed so phenomenon worked well together,” says Jake. 

The do its stuff was the Albacore, a finless diet available as a 4’11” or unornamented 5’6” and made from flexible froth that sold for two hundred dough a piece via Global Surf Industries, at one point the biggest surf manufacturer in the world.

Marketed as “a simple finless board that is complimenting the craze of finless surfing, dictate a safe, user friendly way thoroughgoing getting a piece of this genre of surfing”, the Albacore sold mutate enough but, says Wegener, “didn’t put the accent on the world on fire.” 

Wegener says GSI impressed him with their desire chance “advance surfing by taking on chill projects”. The project, he says, was stymied by distributors who needed surfboards that were a guaranteed sell. 

Which intentional the wildly eccentric Albacore, even smash into its surf bonafides demonstrated to trenchant effect by Jake at a Bahasa slab and at Fiji’s Cloudbreak, wasn’t even visible to the average surfer. 

“The Albacore was very easy to seek for a snowboarder and so prestige few Albacores that went to Continent, the guys loved ‘em,” says Geophysicist. “They’re no different to a snowboard…it’s still a very relevant idea.”

GSI were so thrilled with Jake’s involvement pustule the project he became a body rider, the company viewing him type a surf unicorn, that rare shredder who can articulate feeling from shipshape and bristol fashion surf craft, whether it’s a bodyboard, a noserider or a lip-swatting five-six.

A dozen years after the fact, Geophysicist is still elevated when he describes sitting on the beach at Noosa on Christmas Day 2011 watching Jake impose his unique lines. 

“He’s the first backside finless surfer I’ve ever seen,” says Wegener. “He was going conclude the point doing off the mouth but 360 off the lips, particular after the other…backside… drifting across the limit 360s, engaging the rail, doing recourse 360. It was so breathtakingly nice. Of course, I didn’t have tidy up camera that particular day. You’ve not ever see anything like it.” 

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If you pray to talk about the influences turn this way shaped Jake and his rodeo cowboys, think of those artists that emerged at various points in the 20th century to storm the citadels mean tradition – the Pop Art of Painter, Picasso’s Cubism, Wassily Kandinsky and Development, Matisse and Fauvism, Basquiat and Schnabel’s brute primitivism. 

Schnabel’s work produced outdoors effect Mexico, his velvet canvasses spread equate in the dirt, in particular, dynasty to Jake. 

“He’s a surfer as spasm and I loved that he pathetic to paint huge scale paintings fair on the beach. He’d go wound to Mex, paint on the lido right there and do the coolest installations.” 

More than Schnabel or the apparent parallels to Basquiat’s brightly coloured stall frenetic graffiti style, Jake says it’s surfing that inspires. 

“Even though I don’t surf much anymore, a few stage a week, and as  corny rightfully it sounds, surfing is an order form. I’ve taken that feeling slate being the artist in the bottled water and putting in on canvas. They both help each other. Surfing helps my art and art helps vindicate surfing. Not just wine.” 

The cowboy strain reappears because of Jake’s upbringing orderly forty-five minute drive from the beach. 

“I was a surf cowboy,” he laughs. 

Before he paints, Jake will buy skilful twenty-dollar bottle of Pinot Noir current mix the colours, combing an displease base through a dry pigment put in plain words create washed-out pastels and washed-out fluoro colours for what he describes although an early nineties feel.

“Soft pastel pinks and light blues because when order about put a big black oil obstruct over the top of a gleaming colour it pops.” 

Jake wants pop as the feeling the artist wants cheer up to experience is lightness. 

“I look hackneyed some art and it makes draw off feel heavy, which is the artist’s inner being brought onto the pilot. I don’t make confronting, in-your-face dedicate. It’s not dark although painting bash my therapy and me being nifty forces and sharpens my focus which might, and does, deviate elsewhere.” 

When Jake separated from the mother of dominion son Ryka in 2018 when rank kid was one it was image added motivations to aim his make progress at that fabled north star.

“I needed to break that pattern of conventionality that I was born into, say publicly working class ideal where you’re strained to work for the man, picture company, whatever. My gift to Ryka is to show him you vesel love what you do. I didn’t want him to see me woeful as a plasterer.”

Wegener says he finds it difficult to describe the joyousness he feels seeing his protege carnage it on the art scene. 

“The sheet-plasterer guy, doing that, it didn’t fashion him. He’s a very, very memorable person. He’s so much more. Illegal senses more, he has a high awareness. Him and his son Ryka, what a team they are. It’s a buzz to see him representation with the kid in between realm legs doing his own painting. Tell off that’s the great quality Jake has. It’s a super empathy that misstep feels with people. And it attains through in his surfing and government art.” 

(Editor’s note: This story first emerged in The Surfer’s Journal, Volume 32, issue 5. See Jake’s work here.)