The Art of Jeffrey Lancaster

Jeff Lancaster’s surfing paintings convey the stoke of surfing. If you’re not familiar with the term stoke, according to surfd.com, it is “a sense of exuberance felt by surfers during and after an excellent surf session; stoke can be experienced before a session, based purely upon anticipation of how good the waves will be.” It’s the “before” and “after” that Ojai artist Lancaster tries to capture in his paintings, not the ride itself. Lancaster said he “felt stoke was something that hadn’t been explored — the experience of preparation, anticipation, elation, camaraderie and the journey.“ “It’s the community around surfing. I learned from my elders and peers about caring for your equipment, respect in the water and developing your own style.” Lancaster understands both sides of stoke. He’s been surfing since age 9, and at age 70 continues to get in as many sessions as he can. “I still can’t get a full night’s sleep before I surf, even at my age,” he said. Despite his many travels to beautiful places and tropical surfing meccas (Sumatra, Fiji, Maldives, the local “climbs” in Hawaii) Lancaster’s paintings have a darkness to them. His Instagram handle is @arts_noir, meaning “dark art,” or “night art.” “I avoid the typical bright sunny day and rainbows,” Lancaster said. “Some of my paintings come from surfing’s shadowy side.” When he was growing up, Lancaster said surfers were considered rebels, and that’s not the case now. Lancaster, who grew up in Palos Verdes, said he remembers “always drawing,” and his mom, an artist herself, encouraged him to pursue art as a career, so he attended the California

THE STOKED ART of

College of the Arts in Oakland in the 1960s. He used to work full-time as a graphic designer and illustrator in the entertainment industry, creating album covers, movie posters, and other projects. He moved to Ojai from Santa Monica a decade ago with his longtime girlfriend and is now “semi-retired.” Although Ojai is known as an artist -friendly place, Lancaster said that wasn’t the initial draw for him. “Ojai is one of the only small towns left in California that has a sense of place and a beautiful setting with a mixed culture vibe,” he said.

Jeff Lancaster

While at home during the pandemic, Lancaster has pivoted his focus to daily painting, working most recently in the opaque water medium of gouache, with a style he describes as wandering from “graphic hard-edge print-like to impressionistic.” Switching to painting from graphic design “has been a little bit of a primal scream; it’s very freeing. If people who see it like it, that’s a great addition.” Many of his paintings — surfing-related or not — feature the outdoors and landscapes. But Lancaster is not a plein-air painter, nor does he use photographs of places he’s been. Although he’s inspired by familiar vistas, he’s not trying to recreate particular scenes. “All my art is drawn from memory, and a culmination of ideas,” he said. Jeff has shown his work at shows in a select few galleries but hopes to continue in San Francisco, where one of his sons owns the Book and Job Gallery. In the meantime, he’s discovered a powerful online showcase. “The gallery I’m used to now is Instagram,” he said. “It’s an amazing venue for artists during the pandemic. I get a lot of feedback from people, including other artists, and people I haven’t met who have a visual vocabulary.” Lancaster said he doesn’t have a particular artist philosophy, and doesn’t always know where his motivation comes from, although surfing, nature and people — “anything expressive” — can be inspiration. In addition to surf paintings, his Instagram account currently features images from his “House” series, “spurred on by COVID, and what’s going on politically,” he said. The paintings feature the same house — although sometimes its look varies: a primitive white, rectangular country home with a triangular sloping roof, and the same simple door and windows on the front (or maybe the back).

But Lancaster renders the house in almost surreal ways: teetering on the edge of a cli (“brinksmanship”), half-buried in a lawn, planted in the middle of a freeway interchange, stuck between skyscrapers, on top of someone’s head like a mask, covered in leaves, with vines trailing o like octopus tentacles, split in half horizontally, or surrounded by a moat to keep people out. “A house,” Lancaster said, “can be a place of safety, conflict, growth and expression, so that was the basis for the metaphor,” one all viewers could relate to. But sometimes people take the paintings as metaphors “in a completely different direction” from what he intended. “Without being too politically biased, when things happen in society that are ridiculous, my intent is to comment on it, but I leave the door open for interpretation,” he said. “I try to stick with compelling images that are thought-provoking.” One painting features the house sinking into the ground, tilted on its side along with a mailbox. The work is captioned, “state of liquefaction.” One Instagram commenter wrote, “I truly look forward to seeing what you are thinking about.” And Lancaster, who’s still processing it all himself, replied, “A house is a home, and home is in your head”.