"My name is Eric Soderquist, and I am an artist, wandering the earth, looking for a sign."

A Southern Californian surfer + California impressionist painter.

Interview + Audio by London Red

Soderquist’s studio in San Luis Obispo, CA

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 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

“The biggest misconception of oil landscape painting is that you just walk up to a white canvas just paint a rad painting. ”

— Soderquist

LR: What is a typical day for you?

Eric: "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."

LR: Describe painting for me:

Eric: "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 smell 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."

LR: Tell me about the cow skulls:

Eric: "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."

Painting is just giving a nod of respect to the bigger things - Soderquist

Tell me about your interest with Georgia O’Keefe and how she’s influenced your art:

“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 didn't really get into her stuff until the last few years.”

LR: What inspired you to paint:

Inside of Eric’s San Luis Obispo art studio

Eric: “Before O’Keefe, I was into American Art Review. My grandma had a whole collection of them and she would give them to me. So I could just go through them and that’s were I learned to paint.”

LR: What’s challenging about painting:
Eric: “The most difficult thing to get in painting, is the feeling of it. That’s because, you can’t nail one thing and leave one thing out. You have to nail every aspect of it to get the feeling of like, you’re on that warm bluff and you’re standing and looking down.”

Eric: “The biggest misconception of oil landscape painting is that you just walk up to a white canvas just paint a rad painting. I usually start with a sketch, probably on-site or from reference photos. Then I’ll come back here to the studio and I’ll do color washes, monochromatic schemes. I use red, burnt sienna, that’s about it, and white. I’ll do color washes until I have all my skeletons: all the weights and balances in place. After that’s all in place and I know the composition is right, I’ll hit it with a top coat of oil.”

Painting is just giving a nod of respect to the bigger picture of things, to the overall aspects of the earth. More than anything, it’s a way of slowing myself down, as a human to pay respect to what I love. Being able to be close to the beach and feel the land, and feel the native grasses, smell the grasses, maybe find a salamander in a creek, see the natural aspect of life and how it should be. That’s what I’m trying to capture, while I am still seeing it.

If I grew up in a different environment, say, maybe not so wholesome of an environment, I would have to start creating a dream and painting solely off of my dreams, which is beautiful too. There are people that grew up in very bad situations who develop a dream and a passion and they can break through the barriers of classism or anything, you know? Art is what breaks boundaries.

Painting for me is just a natural way of processing information and actually put me in the place that I want to be at. And when I paint I feel just a little bit of how much greater things are. It’s my expression, being in love and passionate about the earth that I’m on.

-End of interview by London Red-