Rusty's Beach

Mapping the Neighborhood: Sunset Beach and Surfside in the late 50s, early 60s

In my early teens I used to wander the streets, behind buildings and especially along the beach and the back bay. When I was about 15, I sat down and drew this sort of map-aerial view of my old neighborhood. Here's what is what:

1. The lower-left corner is the ocean. The little dots are surfers at a surf spot then known as "Anderson Street", which was also the border between Surfside and Sunset Beach. In 1963 the beach was washed out so the houses to the left (in Surfside) were hanging over the waves on pilings.

2. The narrow double line is the old Pacific Electric railroad that ran through town then.

3. The four-lane road is the Pacific Coast highway or PCH, complete with cars and a Greyhound SceniCruiser bus.

4. The two short streets are Anderson Street, center, and 26th Street, right. I lived on 25th Street, which is just cut off by the airplane wing. (I don't know why I didn't draw my own house...)

5. Above the highway were some funky boat harbors and repair yards adjoining Sunset Bay, the open channels (complete with speedboats) and the salt marshes. These were already being filled in (at upper right) for Huntington Harbour, a huge high-end waterfront housing development that we all hated.

6. The green patches are grassy or marsh areas. The rest was more or less pavement, bare dirt or sand. Our neigborhood had no trees, only some lush plantings in yards and in front of some houses.

7. Houses in Surfside were (and still are) packed together only 3 feet apart. They were little 1930s cottage then, and most have been replaced by 32 foot-tall boxes. Most Sunset Beach houses had back yards and I seemed to know what all of them looked like.

8. The round shape near the center was the Sunset Beach water tower, which is still there though is now a private residence, and was featured once on HGTV.

Below the drawing is a photo I took in 1959 of the tracks looking south from Anderson Street (or toward the lower right in the drawing). The local residents parked their cars, hung out wash and burned their trash along the railroad then. Now it's a long park with paved parking, restrooms, some grass and trees, and no tracks.

Here is Surfside with the washed-out beach during an imagined storm. I drew this at about the same time as I drew the aerial view.

The Story Continued: Being in Disasters

As a teenager, I vented my frustrations and anger at the world by imagining tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, floods and other natural mayhem. I never drew anyone suffering, just human-built structures, usually real ones close to home, being destroyed.  I could get lost in a kind of being state drawing these things completely from imagination and memory. I still work like this today, though usually not so destructively.

I imagine that today I might have had a few interviews with school officials and maybe a psychiatric screening for this kind of thing.

A local gas station exploding in flames after I saw Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds".

The Seal Beach Pier in Southern California getting eaten by a tsunami in 1966.

Part of my elementary school after a mysterious explosion. All I remember about doing this was the challenge of getting the rubble to look authentic!

The story behind my art: Storm Surf!

   

    About four blocks from our house was (is) the town of Surfside. Like Sunset Beach, it was built on a sand beach with two streets lined with small cottages. In the early 1950's most of the sand washed out in a series of storms and the waves then attacked Surfside's beachfront houses. I think I was along when my mom took this picture in 1956. At about that time (I was eight then) I started to walk down here regularly to see the damage.

    It was fascinating and awesome!

    Acres of beach had simply vanished, houses were gone, and the street was covered in sand or missing!

    What power!

    So over time I began to re-create these events in miniature or on paper. Instead of sports or Boy Scouts, I would sometimes wander the back bay and if I found a sandy shoreline and some junk I would build a little town with roads and buildings and a seawall and then clobber it with waves I made with a board... Later I built a 'wave box' in the back yard that I filled half with sand and then spent hours building a model beach house on the sand. I'd then fill the 
'ocean' with the hose, and  bring in the storm surf with a board and that was the end of the house!

    I usually did the wave - board thing by myself, but also built model houses and towns on the beach with my friend Chris. It was an extra treat if the tide came in and the waves got it!

    Then I began drawing the ocean, or trying to, and came up with scenes like the one below, done in oil pastel when I was about 15. I was trying to visualize what it would be like being in one of those Surfside houses when that big wave came that ultimately destroyed it...

The story behind my art and why I do it

 

This painting, done around 1993, tells a lot about my childhood. I loved sunlight on the water, big waves, waves coming over the beach, pelicans, bricks, flowers, warm sand, cars (road trips) and no people... It's called Journal From 1959. (See the journal on the porch. I didn't start my first journal until 1961, but '59 was a big year for me.) This image is available as a limited-edition print by the way--see it in my print gallery.

***************************

The next several posts are going to be about growing up on the coast, primarily in Sunset Beach in Orange County, California. That's where my mom, my brother Dave and sometimes my dad were living when I was born.

Dave still lives nearby in Huntington Beach. He's never lived more than 5 miles from where we grew up, except when he was in the Navy. He's always loved the ocean, surfing, his friends, his cats, the beach and an occasional cigar. His company is called Wave Electric and he's on a campaign to promote solar power.

Dad lives in Corona CA about 50 miles inland. He has always loved fishing, particularly commercial tuna fishing. He was a Marine for many years and spent much of his duty time diving into and cleaning WW II ordnance out of tropical lagoons in the Marshall Islands. Ever since then he's had an affinity for the Marshallese. He also fought in the Korean War, where he saw a lot of shit.

My mom died in 1978. She left Rhode Island for California in 1938 and never went back. She worked as a waitress and sometimes a restaurant manager all her life, except for a few years there where she had her own gift shop selling decorated wicker purses and other gifty things she made herself. She wanted to be a doctor once (her mother put that down as unladylike) then an artist (she went to RISD briefly) but I think she was lured by the social atmosphere (lots of guys) and the good tips to be made by working in fine restaurants. She raised Dave and I mostly on tips!

Somehow she was able to buy our house one block from the ocean in Sunset Beach in 1946. I was born the next year.

                                                       

Merry Christmas

 

Here is one of my favorite paintings of New Island that I did a few years ago, titled "The Yellow Island".  I love wildflowers, and this was inspired by the poppies and lupines that bloom in California in the spring. So here is a little Christmas color from the imaginary side of the world. Enjoy!

Facing the Wave

This photo reminds me of me when I was about seven years old, wanting to go swimming when the waves were too rough. I'd get clobbered but then I somehow survived.

Alison's Beach, New Island

I spend a lot of time daydreaming about being somewhere else...usually a place similar to an ideal Southern California sometime before it was built up, maybe in the 1920's. Then there were only small towns, lots of primitive natural beauty, few cars (people used streetcars and trains!) and a laid-back proto-hippie ambiance.

Most of New Island is a result of these daydreaming jaunts.

Here's a place called Alison's Beach. This part of New Island's eastern coast is little-known and seldom visited, but you might find a meditative hermit. Swimsuits are optional, and the surf here is ideal for bodysurfing.To get here from Victoria Harbor, take Route 6 north all the way to Smallwood, then take M25 to the trailhead near Bailey's Beach. Pack a picnic lunch and water, and have a delightful time.

See map below, with arrow.

Sketches from that island

I'm going to post some sketches of places on that island in the Indian Ocean. I'll include the island's landscape, beaches of course, settlements, lighthouses, 'natural' houses, harbors, etc. They will be from New Island, where I get much of my inspiration.

The picture above is an old watercolor I did of the Poloustrov Lighthouse, also known as South Light at Roaring Cape,the southernmost tip of New Island (see map). 

I'll be traveling there soon.    - Rusty

Painting Islands

 Ok, it’s time to put it all together!  My art work and

New Island

are one.

It says “We are one.” on the

New

Island

one-roger coin, which is the slogan of the country. I guess that means all the parts of my work too.

I’ve been painting scenes I’d like to see most of my life. I love to imagine things then draw them out or paint them as detailed as possible. I grew up in small towns on the

Southern California

coast and was enchanted by the ocean, big surf, the beach, and the nature-loving, laid-back lifestyle. I learned to draw things I wanted to see, everything from tsunamis, explosions, storm-driven surf to snow-covered mountains and pretty girls.  Ever since, I’ve wanted to capture certain beaches, landforms, small towns, older houses, and the woman-who-dances, and have painted these from memories, dreams, and from images of actual places and people. When my customers used to ask me where these places are, I could only say they are imagined…maybe somewhere in California, maybe Oregon, maybe Ireland, or even South Africa.

Eventually I envisioned an island in the south

Indian Ocean

as the location for these drawings and paintings. It emerged as a large, hilly island with a mild, rather dry climate, a friendly English-speaking population that loves nature, and is only sparsely-populated. The idea started with the watercolor below, titled “Dancing on the Edge” done in 1989. I looked at it and wondered where this place was and why was she dancing. So I looked in a world atlas for a place with a climate similar to Southern California’s, that was far from the USA, and that might have a culture that encourages dancing just for the joy in it.

The

South Indian Ocean

is a region that was not fully explored until the early19th century. So an island there could have gone unnoticed until, by chance, ships bearing Australia-bound prisoners from

Britain

might have been blown ashore by storms, allowing a unique culture to flourish there, even under Russian rule beginning in 1820. (You’ll have to read the

New

Island

guidebook to get the whole story…)

So the woman is dancing for Joy, or it’s a meditation, or she’s doing it just for the hell of it. The sun is out, the breeze is fresh, the waves are pounding with a hypnotic rhythm, and the weather might change any minute…

The Wave Dance No. 2   Watercolor, done in 2000
Top: The one-roger coin, common currency of New Island

Back to Painting

Wow, it’s been well over a year since my last entry. 

I’ve been going through a “Who am I, What am I doing?” self-searching period while spending over a year (off and on) working on my dad’s tuna boat, and (earlier) at a fire truck factory delivering parts to the assembly lines. I guess it was the right thing to do, since now I’m doing some new paintings I feel good about.

Here’s one I call “Lost in the Light,Big Sur”.