By Kevin Whitton

Jon Steele kneels down next to one of Chris Ward’s Pipe boards, one he’ll ride in the Pipe Masters. His rusty-colored full beard, trucker hat and square, black-frame glasses conceal his focused demeanor as he rips lengths of masking tape from the diminishing role and quickly applies it to the virgin white board. Once all the tape has been laid to his liking, he grabs a can of spray paint, gives it a quick shake, chucks the cap to the side and starts feathering the paint onto the board in flowing waves of color. Moments later the paint is dry and he removes the tape, grabs a Sharpie and outlines his design.

For Steele, photo editor of California’s SurfShot magazine, the board is not only a work of art, but also a graphic enhancer for the cover shot he plans to capture of Wardo at the Pipe Masters.

“I started doing fine art as a grom,” recalls Steele, “I was going to community college, painting and drawing a lot, and didn’t see myself as good as a lot of people. I knew I wasn’t going to be ‘that’ artist, so that sent me soul searching.”

Originally from Texas, Steele made his way to Santa Barbara, California to attend Brooks Institute of Photography, where he graduated in 2000 with a degree in digital media. His surfing roots landed him an internship at Surfer magazine, where he wrapped his photo-trained eye around the foundations for a career in photojournalism.

But that deep-seeded urge to create art kept tickling at the right side of his brain. Now Steele can’t stay out of the studio, or garage, or wherever his art my take him. Currently he is working with Herbie Fletcher, as an apprentice of sorts, enhancing his knowledge of surfboard art and surf culture with the legendary icon. Personally, his mental expansion of the meaning of art has propelled him into the realm of fine art, combining his photography with painting, sketching, resins and lots of color. Steele manipulates his photos onto workable media and applies tangible layers of color to accentuate his perspective of the intricate layers of life.

“There is a lot of art that I do that are skulls, more hardcore, heavy stuff. It’s wonderful to do, it’s a great outlet, but there’s a fine line between creating and selling that.” Steele is realistic and his art has grown with his worldview, “So what I’ve moved into, and forced myself as part of the learning process, is to work more in color, bright color. The person that’s going to pay a million dollars for a 16-foot print in their house doesn’t want a huge skull, they’re going to want a nice, colorful piece that’s going to bring their whole room together.” Steele still puts skull art on his boards, but that speaks to a different person, and the artist views this as neither good nor bad.

“What I’m really into at the moment is creating a time,” he explains. “I’ve been traveling a lot and I’ve found that it’s hard to explain a place like Indonesia— where I might spend a month— in one photograph. What I’ve been doing is collaging many different photographs of the fish we ate, the people we met, the amazing waves we got, landscapes, the girls we met, and then the colors. It became more of a travel piece.”

With all the traveling, the time away from home and the pressures of creating and meeting deadlines at the magazine, Steele makes sure to find time to take it all in, “I portray what I see in life. I surf and skate through the day and then come home and what about it at night. You have to have some kind of release and sometimes the physical doesn’t always help the mental, so I definitely think art is the mental release. I wouldn’t be the same person without it.”

Caption:

My art comes from my surfing and that’s what does it for. Its so amazing that a person puts themselves inside mother nature and there’s only a few people in the world that know that feeling, so to help describe that to other people— if you can open that door to someone and turn them on to that feeling then that would be the greatest feeling ever.—Jon Steele