by Kevin Cody
John Van Hamersveld taught a class called “Making Images” from 1975 to 1982 at the California Institute of the Arts. The class was broken up by semester into line drawing and painting. He quit, he wrote in the catalogue to his 2013 “Drawing Attention” exhibit at Cal State Northridge, “because the design department…shifted the program focus so it excluded drawing entirely. The idea was that…conceptualizing art as design, you would direct someone else to use their hands to create your work. The view of design…was that design was a service, not an art…So I quit.”
His 2013 observation might have been a forewarning to today’s AI impact on art.
But Van Hamersveld is not a traditionalist. In 2014, he was introduced to Steve Jobs and became an early adopter of digital design.
His 75-foot-long, 19-foot tall “Great Wave” on the side of the Underground Pub and Grill in downtown Hermosa was designed digitally.
Van Hamersveld began to draw at the family dinner table, where his artist mother and Northrop engineer dad often communicated by sketching on napkins. Drawing was a natural pursuit for their dyslexic child who, happily, was naturally gifted at it.
That gift led him to leave his Palos Verdes home for Art Center in Los Angeles after graduating from El Segundo High School. Palos Verdes didn’t have a high school at the time.
Two years later, in 1963, his brilliantly colored and more brilliantly designed school project, a poster for the “Endless Summer” surf movie, pushed him to the forefront of the ‘60s cultural revolution.
The poster became his calling card. Brown Meggs, who signed the Beatles to Capitol Records in 1963, hired Van Hamersveld as his art director in 1967. Van Hamersveld’s album covers over the ensuing 12 months are collectors items today. They included the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” The Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Crown of Creation,” Grateful Dead’s “Skeletons from the Closet,” and Blue Cheer’s “Vincebus Eruptum,” the latter, with its stacks of Marshall amps, louder than the takeoff squeal of a 747.
Van Hamersveld employed a simple device to prevent the required commercial message from compromising his artwork, beginning with his first commercial assignment, a 1962 ad for Bing Surfboards in Hermosa Beach. The ad ran on the back page of Surfing Illustrated, which Van Hamersveld co-founded while still at Art Center with Riviera Village printer Walt Phillips. Hermosa surf photographer Leroy Grannis was the photo editor and Hermosa ski and surf filmmaker Warren Miller a contributing writer.
After carefully choosing and sometimes hand lettering the type, rather than placing it over the art, as commonly done, he used the type to frame the art.
His success in reconciling art and design was validated when both the New York and Los Angeles museums of modern art added his “Endless Summer” and Jimi Hendrix Pinnacle concert posters to their permanent collections.
“There was Andy Warhol among all this,” he acknowledged. “He was able to show you there are two sides to the arts. One was more academic and the other was commercial art. Pop art or popular culture embodied everything around us at the time. And so we were able to see in that, as a generation, an alternative to the military complex, the life that our parents lived in.”
Warhol was an ad designer when he dismantled the distinction between fine art and commercial art with the Los Angeles exhibit of his “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” two years prior to Van Hamersveld’s “Endless Summer” poster.
Van Hamersveld subsequently established an international reputation as both an artist and a designer by refusing to acknowledge a divide between the two disciplines.
He traces his aesthetic to his immersion in the South Bay surf and drug culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
He surfed for the first time when he was 12 at the Cove on a 12-foot, Tom Blake kookbox, loaned to him by Jared Eaton, whose older brother Mike was a shaper for Bing Surfboards and is still one of the sport’s preeminent shapers.
“We put it on a World War l stretcher and pushed it for two-and-a half miles along PV Drive West to the trail leading down to the Cove,” Van Hamersveld recalled.
His first surfboard was a Jacobs. His father bought it for him on his 14th birthday in 1955 at the Velzy-Jacobs shop in Venice. No one was at the shop when they arrived to order the board. Van Hamersveld described the experience in near mythic language.
“I suddenly felt like I should look to the north into the fog and there appeared a green Dodge pickup truck with a deer tied over the hood.,” he remembered. “Velzy quickly hopped out of the passenger’s seat to greet me, while Jacobs lingered to look over the deer on the hood…. Jacobs pulled the bows and steel-tipped arrows from inside the cab. I had never seen anything like this in my young life outside of a Robin Hood movie.”
“We were in the Malibu Mountains hunting,” Velzy said. “It’s great up there.Lots of deer to hunt.”
Lifeguard John McFarlane watched Van Hamersveld grow up in front of his Torrance beach tower.
“Hammer surfed with a hot bunch. He was a good surfer, but a better skier. I bought his skis,” recalled McFarlane (SWOF 2014). Other members of the Torrance beach crew, McFarlane said, were Rick Irons (father of three time world champion Andy Irons), Jeff Hakman (future world champion and Quiksilver co-founder), John Mel (father of Mavericks big wave surfer Peter Mel), future pro and board builder Mike Doyle (SWOF 2013) and Jacob’s team rider Chris Bredesen (SWOF 2005).
On weekends, Van Hamersveld traveled to Rincon and San Onofre with fellow Palos Verdes surfer Phil Becker (SWOF 2003), who was three years older and had a car.
After school, the surfers hung out at the Hermosa Foster’s Freeze, across the street from where his mural is today.
His early drawings, Van Hamersveld said, were inspired by weekly visits to the Palos Verdes Drugstore.
“Like all kids in PV, my awareness of cartoons started at the magazine rack, next to the fountain, with MAD magazine and Playboy, if someone didn’t stop me from looking at the Vargas illustrations. Hot Rod Magazine with Von Dutch’s pinstriping was there too,” Van Hamersveld said.
Rick Griffin, creator of Surfer Magazine’s Murph the Surf cartoon, was one the kids Van Hamersveld would meet up with at the magazine rack. He credits Griffin for his “Endless Summer” poster assignment.
“Without Rick, I would never have met Bruce Brown,” Van Hamersveld said. Griffin introduced Van Hamersveld to Surfer publisher John Severson, who named Van Hamersveld his art director. “Endless Summer” filmmaker Bruce Brown came to the magazine looking for an artist to do a poster for $150, which is all the money Van Hamersveld has ever made from the poster.
“Ideas come from the imagination and the imagination is like a cloud,” Van Hamersveld said in explaining his process. “The designer crops out a section of the idea and draws it on napkins and pads. It’s not well defined. We need references, people, waves, to harden up the image. I go through tissue after tissue, balancing the positive and negative space to get balance and [before loading his palette], to ‘see’ color, as five percent of this color, 30 percent of that color.”
Though now in his eighth decade, Van Hamersveld, has embraced social media.
“The challenge to artists is to get people to see their art. No one drops by galleries anymore. The artist needs to utilize social media.”
He cites his Hermosa surf mural as an example of how people experience art today.
“People will swarm around it, wearing their earphones waiting to get into the bar or waiting at the stoplight. People take selfies and the image goes around the world,” he said. SWOF
