Jessica Ballantyne’s Surfboard Art- Surreal, Figurative and erotic oil painting on a 1.7m board

New work; using a surfboard as a canvas

Surfs up! Well maybe not with this special board…

When someone you know has a couple of surfboards lying around, not being used (except for that time when a group of friends took one out to a snowy hilltop, removed the fins and used it as a four person sledge) you do what any ‘sane’ artist would, ask if you can have the surfboards and then use them as a canvas.

Inspiration behind the piece

I had the idea of creating a human totem pole.

The idea was to create a body (almost like a tree) that was growing, morphing and pulsating into different parts, a body that was uninhibited and uncontrollable. It’s a ‘dream body’ with a sleeping figure at the bottom who acts as the subject; holding the weight of the fleshy mass above. I wanted to express a kind of sexual awakening or growth. I use the female body to create an image of feminine sexuality and presence. I love using distortion and optical illusions for people to see more in a piece the more they look at it. This is a kind of visual game I like to play with spectators.

How I made it

The initial sketch

The idea started as a sketch (as many of my paintings do) which I then transformed into a massive 2.4m pencil drawing on wallpaper. The pencil drawing formed the basis of the idea I had for the surfboard although with the surfboard art, I wanted the painting to be bright, vibrant and like ‘eye candy’.


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Totem Pole pencil on wallpaper 240 x 40 cm

The Surfboard

After sanding and then priming the surfboard with three coats of acrylic gesso, I started off with the main composition in layers of artists acrylic paint. To get the form right and decide on composition, I often first do a couple of layers in acrylic paint before moving to oil paint. It dries faster and lets me get the basics down before applying the thin layers of oil paint .

I did change my mind a few times (as usual) and had to paint over and repaint many of the areas in the background but I am really pleased with the winding, green vines I ended up with and the phallic like protrusions that sneaked into the composition:)

I enjoyed distorting the painted body and mismatching parts, hinting at others whilst completely blurring the lines of where one part starts and the other begins.

The whole fabulously surreal piece culminates, right at the top of the board, in fertile, voluptuous ‘breast fruits’ (I just made that up) and ‘angels trumpet’ flowers, an extremely poisonous flower known for it’s beauty and hallucinogenic properties.

I wanted all the warmth of colour and light to come from this point and move down the colour spectrum as well as the surfboard to the purple face at the base of the surfboard.


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Get your limited edition miniature of the original surfboard! Available soon in my shop 🙂

 

These little babies are wooden miniature versions of the original board. They are each hand made by me, with a high quality print of the original surfboard art on the front and finished with three coats of lacquer. Only 100 of these have been made, each one is signed and numbered on the back.


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Surreal, Twisted, Surfboard Art

Surreal, Twisted, Surfboard Art

Progress of the vibrant, acrylic and oil painting I am working on!

I decided to get these two amazing, near perfect condition surfboards out of the attic and paint something you wouldn’t usually see on a surfboard. This is my progress of the first one!

I lived in Durban, South Africa for four years of my teenage life and , although I was a bit of a goth, I would still go the beach pretty often (even if it was in my black polar neck and baggy pants – I thought I looked cool but I think I just looked hot, and not the good kind of hot). I loved watching the waves, the people and the surfers and feeling the sand between my toes and fresh air in my hair…

I loved the sea, I still do, and it felt like a tropical paradise living near the sea. There was such a wealth of trees and exotic flowers and so much green! Not like the green deserts (what I call crops) in the UK that are sprayed to avoid damaging insect life, but green trees and bushes full of insects and creatures….and monkeys! That’s what I remember. So, in a way this surfboard fine art piece is dedicated to that kind of vibe; a fertile, lush and green fleshy totem of the feeling I get when I think of the sea in South Africa.

Of course, on looking at the surfboard, one can read other things into the painting like eroticism, sexuality and fetish object too.

😉

I’m not sure what you see (you can tell me in the comments if you like).

Enough about that here are some pics of the process….


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This is the first layer done in acrylic paint, today I move on to the oil paint layer so hopefully it will be a vibrant and shimmering piece once its finished!