Why Raymond Pettibon Keeps Returning to the Wave

Raymond Pettibon grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, with surf culture all around him. His parents thought the sport too dangerous and its equipment too expensive, so he watched from the shore. By the late 1970s, he was making drawings for the punk band Black Flag, founded by his brother Greg Ginn. Then, in 1985, the wave entered his work. What began as a local image became one of the most recognisable subjects in contemporary drawing.

Pettibon’s waves are vast, but the surfer is often barely a mark. That difference in scale gives the pictures their charge. The figure looks impossibly vulnerable and, at the same time, capable of riding through. Pettibon has connected big-wave surfing to the sublime: nature seen at its most beautiful and most frightening. He has cited Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, placing these Pacific swells in conversation with the great landscapes of art history.

The wave also lets Pettibon do something he loves: bring movement, image and language together. The artist has stated that surfing has a fluidity he can capture without relying on cartoonish lines. His handwritten words rarely settle what we are seeing. They can make an apparently triumphant ride feel ominous, or find a moment of calm beneath the breaking water. The surfer’s fate remains open. That uncertainty draws us back into the image.

No Title (Our Secret Spot) brings the motif into sharp focus. This six-colour lithograph, from an edition of 35, places a solitary surfer against a towering swell. It was printed in New York at Derriere L’Etoile Studios, where Pettibon has worked with master printer Maurice Sanchez for more than two decades. The deep blue and quick, energetic marks draw you into the scene, while the tiny red rider gives it a sense of immediacy.

In Don’t Complicate The Moral World, the familiar blue gives way to red. A small surfer is surrounded by forceful red and black marks, while the title’s blunt instruction hangs above the turmoil. It is hard to follow such a neat command when the world below it looks anything but simple. This edition of 30 recalls Pettibon’s No Title (Don’t complicate the...), a 1987 drawing held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Why keep returning? Pettibon has said that every wave he makes differs from the last, and that he is still learning whenever he picks up a brush or pen. The sea gives him a subject that will never hold still or yield a final answer. In Our Secret Spot, the surfer has found a place within its force, if only for a moment. The wave is about to break. What happens next is ours to imagine.