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The San Diego Union Tribune Tuesday, February 4, 1997 www.signonsandiego.com

Love of the Sea Channeled into Shimmering Art by Terry Rodgers, Coastal Issues Writer


Surfing came first. His Van Gogh side emerged latter, like the flower of the desert agave, or century plant. Greg Gutierrez became infected with surf fever at age 10. Through his mid-20s, he lived in pursuit of the ocean’s liquid thunderheads.

Then, around age 30, when others begin to mourn their lost youth, he reinvented himself as an artist. He has been a lifeguard, ran a surfboard shop in Hawaii, managed a ski-rental shop in Mammoth and was the co-founder and graphic designer for an apparel firm called Maui Life.

Fast forward to 1997: Gutierrez, 37, teaches seventh grade at La Presa Middle School and shares a nice suburban home in Chula Vista with an attractive wife and doting daughter.

But none of these comforts has dulled his twin passions, surfing and art. Out amongst the swells, he says, “is the only place I feel comfortable and at home.” His home beak is a well-known spot along the Sunset Cliffs, where he manages to surf three or four times a week. The place, he says, even has its own special odor, fishy and moss-like, that triggers his endorphins.

“That moment before I paddle out, when I’m just looking at the ocean, it’s almost religious,” he says.

He’s also a frequent visitor to Todos Santos offshore from Ensenada, where thick northwest swells produce of the most epic waves of the Wes Coast. He has nailed it there when it has been quadruple overhead – four times the height of a man – but he’s superstitious talking about it. “It’s like Hemingway said, Talking about it ruins it,” he says.

Once, at age 6, he nearly drowned while swimming in the ocean off Mazatlan. His father swam out to save him, got caught in the same rip current and swam with him to shore. When Greg finally reached the safety of the shore, his father slapped him and screamed, “Respect the ocean.” The boy never forgot that admonition.

College-educated but not formally trained in art, Gutierrez found his affinity for the fine arts was suddenly uncorked after he stroked his first childlike designs for T-shirts. It was as though he had been struck by a bolt of cadmium yellow.

His early paintings were dominated by ocean and surfing images. The old passion served as an inspirational touchstone for the new one.

Often he paints on large canvases, just like the type of waves he prefers. One of his largest is a 5-by-8-foot oil on canvas entitled, “Currents” that hangs above his living-room sofa. The stunning piece depicts how wavy, serpentine sea-grass fronds behave as they are being stroked by ocean swells.

But, since the birth of his daughter, three years ago, Gutierrez discovered the colors on his palette have expanded from dominant greens and blues to the oranges, reds and bright yellows that spark a child’s imagination. “I can’t paint unless I feel good,” Gutierrez says. “For me, painting is real positive. It’s love. It’s goodness.”

He does impressionistic portraits of his heroes: great thinkers, writers, and surfers. He has done Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Kelly Slater and Ken Bradshaw.

He paints in six-hour marathon sessions, usually late at night, and typically on four to seven canvases at once. “Kinda like an orgy,” he says, referring to his paint-splattered garage as “the studio of a madman.”

There’s little equivocation in his work. His art oozes with emotion, slaps you with its intensity. “Sometimes when I finish a painting, I feel like it took a year off my life,” he says. “It’s that draining.”

He has sold about 300 of his paintings. He also barters with buyers for goods and services, including his subscription to The Surfer’s Journal.

None of the dozen pieces in his current show, “Painting Prayers,” at the Arveda Gallery in La Jolla hint that they were created by a man who feels at one with the ocean. The effete elite that controls modern art scoffs at such themes as “too California and not intellectual enough,” he says. “The art world will never respect surf art because of the academicians.”

Art and surfing, he explains, are both a refuge. “I have the kind of personality that physically I have to wear myself out,” he says. “Some people do it running. Surfing does that for me. It quiets my mind. And painting does that, too. It quiets the turmoil.”


Terry Rodgers can be reached at 619-293-1713; or by e-mail at terry.rodgers@uniontrib.com