Surfboards and surf accessories

Surfing, skating, and rock and roll: What more does a young man need? Mix those passions with a love of comic books, add a discerning eye and a talented hand, and you’ve got a rare artist whose resume spans half a century. His name is Jim Phillips.

In July, Schiffer Publishing released its third gathering of Phillips’s work, The Skateboard Art of Jim Phillips, an exhaustive scrapbook retrospective cobbled together by the artist himself. The 208-page soft-cover book is also laced with Phillips’ autobiographical narrative that begins in 1955 in Santa Cruz, California, where he and his buddies hammered together orange-crate skate scooters. Soon enough as the story goes, the crate god left out of the equation, and they dubbed their streamlined version of a “bun board” (not because they rode it sitting down, but because riding it invariably meant falling on your ass).

The one day, Phillips’ friend asked him to draw a monster on the nose of his balsa surfboard. The enamel rendition bulged with bloodshot eyes and forked tongue-it was Phillips’ first board graphic and harbinger of things to come.

Do your skate roots reach the days of high-top Chucks and ten-inch-wide maple concaves? If so you can ever forget the Rob Roskopp monster busting through the bull’s eye. And what about 80s Santa Cruz pro Keith Meek’s first graphic?

“I had a shape but no graphic,” remembers Meek. “When Jim showed [the art] to me, I just took one and looked at it- it was so sick, with the Slasher riding the blade- and I just said, “wow, done deal- that’s my graphic.”

And even if you were born well after the days of Hang Ten shorts and flat oak planks, you’d be hard-pressed to find a ledge that hasn’t been gouged by a set of hangers engraved with arguably the most iconic skate brand on the planet: the Independent iron cross. That’s Phillips’ baby. So is the classic Road Rider wheel-with-wings. You can also count Steve Olson’s checkerboard and Duane Peter’s stripes among Phillips’ simple yet groundbreaking work.

Dig deeper and you’ll find Phillips airbrushing surfboards and drawing rock posters (mostly famously for The Doors) after getting kicked out of art school, despite a scholarship and straight A report card, when college administrators found out he never got his high school diploma.

By Keith Patrick

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