The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
In row after row of nondescript, 1950s-era industrial buildings in Costa Mesa, California, artists rent cheap studio space. Three fulltime surfer-artists—Chris Gwaltney, Wolfgang Block, and Kevin Ancell—lease space within a three block radius. Coastline Community College and RVCA headquarters are within walking distance, and Hurley’s headquarters sit about a half-mile away. You can check the surf by walking over to CCC and going up to the second floor. From its spacious back balcony, it offers a five-mile panorama of Newport jetties and south Huntington Beach
It’s a no man’s land—a place to work, to be forgotten, and undisturbed. In one of these units dwells Alrik Yuill. At first one might mistake the millennial, Euro-looking Alrik for a Scandinavian, and you would be half right and half wrong. Yuill is a Scandinavian name, and Alrik is half Scandinavian, but his family comes from Scotland. As he puts it, he’s, “a northern European mutt born in Goleta.” What sets his story apart, though, is that he was brought up on a commune throughout the 80s and 90s—a collective that centered its beliefs on the teachings of the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded by Paramahansa Yogananda.
I will not regurgitate the history of communes in California, suffice to say they were popular in the late 60s and, by the end of the 70s, had by and large run their course. It’s a head-scratcher to learn there was still a functioning commune in Goleta in the late 20th century, and equally startling to run into one of its progeny.
It’s as if Alrik stepped out of a time machine, a hippie in our midst. His family moved to Newport Beach when he was 9. He attended Newport Harbor High School and, while exhibiting his student work there, a faculty member of the Laguna College of Art and Design encouraged him to apply to their program.
LCAD is known for its focus on figuration and classical training, and it’s one of the only schools in California to have maintained this emphasis since the 60s. For a college, this mission seemed to be an anachronism in the late 20th century. However, with the reemerging need to train digital artists in traditional techniques in the 21st century, classical training has been revitalized, and LCAD has become an important school for artists studying gaming and clothing design.
Alrik was attracted to the sculpture department, where he received instruction in traditional materials like clay, plaster, bronze, wax, and stone. The emphasis of the department heavily referenced the history of Greek and Roman statuary. For Alrik, this unleashed a predisposition for philosophic questions that have nagged at art historians for centuries—the links between love and lust, truth and beauty, and beauty and spirituality, in addition to the concept that spiritual bliss and physical bliss can be equated via allegory.
It can be seen as problematic to sculpt a nude female figure in contemporary culture. Traditional notions of beauty have long been scrutinized, and much of the 20th century’s art-historical discourse is about the objectification of the female body under the male gaze. Today the female nude is found most often in commercial art or in popular culture, where feminist discussions are not as prevalent.
Nevertheless, one of the most interesting and important contemporary art theorists, Dave Hickey, has pointed out how important the human figure is to contemporary sculpture: “All sculpture throughout the history of art addressed the relationship of bodies in space, and the human body was the keystone of that relationship. The debt of contemporary sculpture to traditional sculpture, therefore, was unavoidable and usually legible. At its heart, sculpture is about the scale of the object relative to the body.”
Alrik’s major sculptural pieces are slightly larger than life. His female nudes, which clearly reference Greek sculptures of Venus, rise up and emerge from their own crushed castings, linking the process of creation with beauty. The artist has also created a set of small, handheld sculptures in more suggestive poses that are strikingly similar to the tiny bronzes that Roger Kuntz, an artist from Orange County, created in the 1960s. These are more playful than his oversized female castings and suggest the flipside to female beauty and spirituality—carnal beauty.
Yet Alrik’s sculptures are removed from us in more ways than one. They are not something that compels one to reach out and physically touch them. In fact, the bases of the large sculptures, coupled with their massive size, create a physical and visual distance. These are objects meant for contemplation and reflection—a visual meditation on the gap between physical perfection and spiritual perfection.
More mysterious, and less resolved, are Alrik’s paintings, which seem like environments for his sculptures by conveying an overall sense of landscape. His abstract marks on these paintings look like Chinese calligraphy, or the alien writings in the 2016 film Arrival. Smaller paintings and drawings on paper are more straightforward and intimate: cartoon-like figurative sketches, similar to the early work of Los Angeles artist John Altoon.
In addition to being a visual artist, Alrik is a surfer and a shaper. The swallowtail, full-nosed, straight-hipped boards he often builds feature Bonzer-like concaves in another example of his time traveling proclivities. He shapes using Styrofoam blanks, which he claims have better memory and snapback when glassed to his specifications. He glasses these stringer-less crafts clear, so that the white of the board comes through and emphasizes their shape, which sets up a direct visual reference to his snowy, plaster-cast sculptures in the setting of his studio.
Aesthetically, there’s something distinctively pleasing about them. They read like totems to modernism and a nod to futuristic spaceships, à la science fiction of the 1950s. They also harken back to a time before the acrobatics and aerials of today, when the face of the wave was ridden for the sensations of speed, power, and flow. Incorporating full turns, full cutbacks, and line selection—in order to gain speed for each snapback of a properly flexing board—this approach is primarily about riding a wave in a symbiotic relationship, rather than using it as a force to act upon.
The physical interaction with a surfboard—its height slightly bigger than the human form, the way that we lay on it and are in contact with its surface, always grabbing its rails, feeling it underneath us in the water, assessing how it reacts to the pressure of a wave against it—is one of the most physically intimate experiences we can have with an object. The dialogue one can engage with via sculpture has characteristics in common with the dialogue one can have with a surfboard: you sensate both, knowing them intuitively, in relationship to your body.
Alrik is acutely aware of this, and the transfer of that bodily sensation comes through in his shaping and art-making. Additionally, the process of making his sculpture—creating the molds, doing the pours, cleaning up, and finishing the surfaces—is as craft-heavy for him as shaping. In a word, Alrik is a Bohemian, maintaining a lifestyle well outside of the norm, searching for himself in the realms of art and spirituality, exploring ancient archetypes of beauty, yogic traditions, and arcane surf practices. The world could use more like him.
[Feature image: Photo by Dylan Gordon.]
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