ARTIST : ERIC SODERQUIST
ERIC’S WORK CLICK HERE
"My name is Eric Soderquist, and I am an artist, wandering the earth, looking for a sign."
A Southern Californian surfer + California impressionist painter.
Eric Soderquist lives up North. He is a painter and surfer with quite the talent. You may have seen the book, The California Surf Project. He and longtime friend and surf photographer, Chris Burkard decided to get together and create a book on their surf journey down the California coast. It's an epic book with killer images from Burkard and writings from Soderquist.
Eric invited me to come check out his studio and home in San Luis Obispo. We drove up in the adventure-mobile, and headed up North in the early grey hours of the morning. Driving up the 1, over rolling hills and misty lands, past rugged cliffs and the majestic ocean, we arrived. Soderquist greeted us with a smile that only a Soderquist can give. We spent the day drinking coffee, checking out his studio, filming and driving in the rad Soderquist-mobil. He's a traveler, a wild man and one exceptionally talented painter. - London Red
*Original audio interview published in 2012.
"A typical day is, I get up and ride my beach cruiser to the coffee shop, get a cup of coffee, talk to all my buddies, ride down to the beach, go surf. Think I'm gonna end up painting, but I end up golfing. Then I start it all over the next day, until I have about no time to do all the paintings I have to do and cram them into 24 hrs."
"When I look at certain paintings, I can almost smell them. I can smell the warm grasses and I can smell the different flowers and the ocean. In california, the lifestyle has an influence on what I see and what I paint, like the blue oaks and the golden grasses; things like that."
"I was on a massive ranch inland, and a rancher gave me a cow skull. I thought it was sacred and righteous to see something that lived and died in the open plains. So I began to paint them and make a sculpture out of them." -Soderquist
"I started studying Georgia O'Keefe and all her paintings she did with skulls. Basically she was trying to express that there was an undisturbed, still, very vast nature out there, that is a beautiful and sacred thing. She [O'keefe] sold these paintings for 20-30,000 dollars a piece in the early 1900's. Imagine how hard she was rollin'. She was way beyond just some mild artist, floating through life. I didnt really get into her stuff until the last few years."
