The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
It’s a hot afternoon in San Juan Capistrano and there’s a south swell running when Brian Bent pulls his ’56 Ford out of the garage port at his house. The spot is normally occupied by a rotation of 30s-to-50s-era hot rods, but Bent is clearing a workspace for his friend, Kim Francis, a shaper visiting from Spain’s Basque Country who’s here to build a 50s-style longboard. Bent’s home is also from the 50s, a three bedroom, but at his wife Rivka’s acquiescence, he’s turned the master bedroom into an art studio.
Those who have met him know the 1950s are about as far forward in time as Bent tends to travel when making his short-piped, un-muffled, period-correct hot rods. The same applies for his paintings and his surfboards. In some ways this is odd when considering that, at 52 years old, Bent never experienced the era that inspires his cars, his clothing, or his artistic craft.
When I ask him about the source of these obsessions, at first, he’s unsure how to answer. I suggest that maybe he’s just someone who’s inclined to nostalgia.
“No,” says Bent. “I’m not inclined to nostalgia,” which is hard to believe—especially coming from a man who dresses in 50s-style clothing, lives in a 50s-era home, is surrounded by 50s-built hot rods, and is having a 50s-accurate board shaped out back.
Maybe there were some artistic influences from that time-period, then, I ask. What about the Beat Generation or California Scene Painters of the 50s?
“I don’t know about any scene,” Bent says, laughing at this suggestion.
Then maybe he’s plucked the things that he likes from those eras on his own, free of influence?
“No, I don’t think of it as plucking,” he says. “I usually go pretty head on into one era, actually.”
It’s worth noting that if there’s one subculture or period after the 50s that Bent has drawn on for inspiration, it’s 80s punk rock, and with it, apparently, a bit of the strong-headedness that comes with that musical taste. Only after I abandon such a direct line of questioning does Bent begin to explain how he became obsessed with an era he never lived.
His grandparents, he says, helped raise him, first in the South Bay of Los Angeles and later in San Juan Capistrano, where he’s been since he was 8. His grandmother went to grade school with Marilyn Monroe and his grandfather built hot rods before and after World War II. The family had a ’49 Chevy pickup, and Bent’s grandfather would roam Southern California buying car parts from hobos in exchange for food, or collecting scrap iron, which he began selling to help build the Watts Towers. Unfortunately, the old man had sold all of his hot rods by the time Bent arrived. “I only got to see photos of them,” says Bent. “But I’ve always wanted to look at those old photos and I’m still exactly like that. I get most of my inspiration from photographs.”
If static images are Bent’s primary source material for his builds and his artwork, they’re an unlikely form of inspiration for someone whose aesthetic is governed almost entirely by movement and speed. This is true not only with regard to his preference for hot rods and punk rock. He says he also fell in love with surfing 30s-style kook boxes, which he now builds at his house, because of the newfound appreciation they gave him for trim. Yet, as I point out, there are also dysfunctional elements of period-correct, outdated cars and surfboards, which are often less-than-optimized for speed.
“I disagree,” he says. “I see ‘kook box’ as a kind of derogatory term. I prefer calling them ‘zip dishes’ or ‘wave dragsters.’ They get all these bad names, like ‘poser planks’ because you literally strike a pose on them. But, the reason you have to pose is that it helps you go faster in the curl. It changes your style. If you can learn how to do that, you can go twice as fast when you get on a foam board.”
Bent applies these same elements of refined speed to his paintings, most evidently perhaps in his stylized renditions of surf magazine covers. He usually works in the master-bedroom-turned-art-studio, painting on an amplifier or on the floor, and is able to complete these reinterpretations in just a single afternoon. His approach has a consistent effect on the final look of the work, and it’s especially noticeable when comparing the pieces to the original magazine covers and photos that inspired them.
Photographs, as any surfer who has seen an image of themself riding a wave has experienced, can make most waves appear underwhelming—a little smaller and slower than they actually are. The hurried approach that Bent takes to his paintings, however, creates something that looks much more the way surfing feels than does the photographic originals. “I like having the structure of the surf magazine cover,” he says, “because it allows me to work fast like that. I need that structure. Otherwise my brain will go off in too many directions.”
Magazine imagery and iconography were points of focus for Bent before he even became a painter. As a kid, while his grandfather was hunting garage sales and swap meets for car parts, Bent started collecting old issues of Mad, and later, surf magazines. The work of artists like Don Martin and John Severson, who had to produce their illustrations quickly, under the pressure of a deadline to publish, motivated him to begin painting on his own.
Working at such a fast pace has also enabled Bent to take on more remunerative commercial work to support himself. He began earning his living as an artist painting the interiors of surf shops for Phil Becker. “That taught me I couldn’t spend time making fine art and wasting the shop’s money,” he says. Later, he found work producing paintings of star athletes such as Kobe Bryant, Tim Lincecum, and Clay Matthews through the sports-bracelet company Power Balance. “My job was to produce six paintings a week from sports-action photos,” he says. “They would send my paintings to their athletes as a nice personal touch.”
Even once you understand the how’s and why’s of Bent’s time-capsuled painting, surfing, and hot rodding, it’s still unclear just how far he’s willing to let these period-correct eccentricities invade his life—or, more importantly, how far is too far. Surfing has departed in so many ways from the era of the 1950s. Surfers have rejected gas-guzzling hot rod culture and turned toward environmentalism. Surf media, as it exists diffused across our social streams, is obsessed with progression, often eschewing the past in the process. This makes Bent, whose roots go back to a time in Southern California when there were far fewer surfers—and far different values—a rare and dying breed.
I ask him what he considers most worthy of preserving from those eras he loves—and what he thinks is best adopted from the present? When we arranged our interview, for instance, his email reply ended with the standard “sent from my iPhone” sign-off. Did he still have a little longing for the rotary telephones and switchboards of yore, just like his hot rods and kook boxes? Where did he draw the line?
“I call that fashion bondage,” he says. “I don’t know what the limits are but I don’t think you should be in bondage. I’m not afraid to change whenever I feel like it.”
Bent doesn’t have a sense of being tethered to the past, but he evidently still prefers moving through time in the opposite direction, digging farther back into the bygone cultures of Southern California. “A friend tells me that by the time I’m a little older, I’ll be riding a horse and carriage down to the beach with my surfboard,” he says.
And if a man so obsessed by history could transport himself back for a day to surf any place on earth via time machine, where would that be? He initially seems overwhelmed by this question. He stops to think carefully but then answers with confidence: “San Onofre in the late 40s.”
Most surfers would likely use that golden ticket for a flight back to a far-flung or higher quality surf destination than their home break—say, a remote island chain now overrun by surf charters. That Bent chooses his own backyard, and a scene not dissimilar to the one he’s living within today, is testament to just how content he is in the present. He couldn’t care less that time marches forward. He’ll continue working backward, scouring the past to make every day being Bent that much better.
[Feature image: Photo by Dylan Gordon.]
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