Reviews of ZEN on Honolulu Star Advertiser

An excerpt from The Surfer's Journal, Volume 7, Number 4...


I suspect that Chula Vista surfer/artist Greg Gutierrez is as well-know to other surf magazine editors as he has become to me. This guy churns short writings and paintings in such a prolific stream that they resemble a "train of consciousness" output. He directs his stream, in the form of color prints and manuscripts of his latest works, relentlessly out into the world of surfing and art, demanding no response, yet hoping, no doubt, that some of it sticks to the wall somewhere.

Meanwhile, he keeps churning it out in a virtual creative blitzkrieg! If you visit Greg's pleasant suburban home, you will find that he paints in his garage. It's walls are are not unlike the art that comes out of his space, covered with rich textural globs of color, psychic over spray, so to speak. On the ceiling of his garage, suspended fins up, is his quiver, a very business like assortment of racy mid-length spears. Not surprisingly, their decks are thickly wax coated in a splotchy, abstract, artistic pattern, not too different from the spew of paint on the wall, the canvas... the words on paper.

I personally love the energy and the purity of Greg's art and how it transmits to his relationship with wave riding. I sense a tremendous and comforting consistency. And make no mistake about it, this humble powerful man is a hard-core wave rider. While you check the assemblage of his output in this issue, you can feel the stroke he engenders in everything he does.