Artist, Caia Koopman

Caia Koopman

Pop Surrealism Artist

Possibly the first woman to make an art career out of action sports, Caia Koopman kicked off her career creating graphics for pro female snowboarders. Now, the same enchanting faces and surreal symbols grace recent collaborations, such as the award-winning book Umijoo, the evocative bottle art for Trust Me Vodka, and the Santa Cruz Sea Walls mural project with PangeaSeeds. Everywhere in her paintings, bold symbols of our mortality exude gratitude for the ecosystem we depend on. In her hands, beauty begets reverence; loveliness, and grit spur activism.

You once wrote about manipulating the subjective beauty of female faces towards a message: “What is it about a pretty face that so unfairly and shallowly stops us in our tracks...? Then will my audience next reward me with a moment of their time to listen to my message?”

I still do that. I just did that same trick for my mural in fact. I had three people come up to me and say my girl’s face was so beautiful that it made them want to cry, and then I zap them with a message about ocean acidification.

Which reminds me: Our oceans are becoming acidic enough to dissolve shells, which is, as you can imagine, really bad for shellfish and all the animals that eat them, and our entire ecosystem for that matter. Our excess CO2 plus H2O equals carbonic acid. Our oceans have been busy soaking up so much of our excess CO2 that they have more or less saved us land dwellers from the full effects of climate change thus far. But it’s starting to tip the pH balance of the entire world’s oceans. The title of my mural is Let’s Solve the Dissolve.

Written by Esther Young Photography by Avni Levy

Medium as Message

Written by Johanna Harlow Photography by Daniel Garcia

“As an artist and skater I just wanted to be part of that world so badly, but as a female I wasn’t really allowed into the clubhouse.”

–Caia Koopman

How.did.your.upbringing.shape.your. vibrant.care.for.our planet?

My dad was a big fan of catch, teach, release. He was always catching a poor little snake or frog or lizard, or whatever, and showing it to us kids, explaining something interesting about it, and letting it go in exactly the same place he’d found it.

Being raised to see the world through a scientific lens took some of the emotion out, but encouraged concern and interest— asking questions like, “What’s wrong with this picture, and how can we do better?”

When has this question resonated with you most deeply, allowing it to appear in your art?

In much of my art, I portray the idea of memento mori: remember that you have to die. We are blessed with a long, or maybe not-solong, life on this magical planet, and with life comes death, as we are all connected with each other, with everything.

I think a lot of empathetic young people get their first taste of death when a cherished pet dies. And I had some early paintings that were little funeral scenes. Rabbit was a moody image of a forlorn girl holding a dead rabbit in one hand and her skateboard in the other. I also did one of a kitty funeral, looking down from above, attempting the style of Van Gogh’s bedroom scene.

But later I had to revisit the concept of loss when I was struggling with infertility. This also showed up in much of my work, some more obvious than others. Painting was very cathartic for me and helped me move past what at the time felt like soul crushing heartbreak. In hindsight, there are many other ways to have a fulfilling life.

Some of your work screams punk scene, and your very first commissioned T-shirt design was by a skateboard company. What was it like creating within these spheres, especially as a woman in the late ’80s and early ’90s?

As a young person, I was very attracted to the energy of the punk scene. I had a bad case of teen angst and the rebellious bug, and I was obsessed with the idea of fairness and justice. The punk scene to me was the height of cool, but it also stood for something: kids who wanted the world to be a better place, who pointed out inequities, corruption, and the general shittiness of the adult world. It felt like I was amongst peers who would all grow up and make positive change.

Skateboard graphics have always been this weird, cool, super-creative, self-sustaining art world. It’s its own genre and doesn’t care about what anyone else is doing, unless it’s mocking something of course. As an artist and skater I just wanted to be part of that world so badly, but as a female I wasn’t really allowed into the clubhouse.

In the late 80s, I was enthusiastically seeking an artist position at a skate company here in town. I had a friend who worked there already and put a good word in for me. I thought I had a really good chance of getting the job drawing skate graphics and T-shirts. I even created a cool little zine for my job application: it was an illustrated story of a girl who was a rip’n skater and just wanted to be part of the local crew. They turned me down, stating that they didn’t want any girls in the clubhouse, because they wouldn’t be able to tell dirty jokes or whatever. It was so honest—I give them credit for that.

But when snowboarding came around, that was my ticket to participate. That’s when I really started doing a ton of graphics.

From your experience, how did snowboarding offer more opportunities to women?

There were lots of female pros in snowboarding. That didn’t really exist in skateboarding (with a few very talented exceptions), and the female pro snowboarders would often pick a female artist to do their graphics. That was the majority of my early board graphics work. I was most often drawing what the athlete wanted.

Later, when I was hired by Rossignol, I worked with a super-talented art director who would take one of my paintings, the more detailed the better, at his request, and cut it up to make as many boards and skis as he could. We had to change my contract, so I was being paid per board rather than per painting which was the original deal. It all worked out in the end. Those were the handful of years that Rossi boards and skis were plastered in my plants, flowers, birds, and a few girls and monsters.

You’ve been so busy with collaborations. In what direction is your personal art driving you?

Lately, I’ve been transitioning from an artist doing commercial work to finding my place as a fine artist. Art in galleries has been a parallel universe to art on boards for many years now, but in recent years I’ve decided to take fine art more seriously, get better at portraits, paint more realistically, improve my craft, and just generally take it up a notch. I feel like I’m reinventing myself as an artist, but this time around it’s without the help of the cool trend I was riding, which I like as a new challenge. C