Lifestylin': Surf Artist Todd Fischer

It's the gods’ country. The Olympic Peninsula. The sun dances off the windblown whitecaps and refracts in the depths of the protected coves along the coastline of the Hood Canal.The above-the-treeline peaks jut up from the ocean nearly 8,000 feet. Looking from Todd Fischer’s back porch, the mountain range divides the bluebird sky from the cobalt blue of the Pacific.

In a converted garage at the end of a country lane that tees the coastline, Todd paints his interpretations of the vista surrounding him. His brush leaving behind colored traces of the feelings evoked by the majesty of creation and his place in it as a surfer and admirer.

He works in watercolor, fully utilizing the two properties making up his medium. Each painting is lit with vibrant strokes--ocean blues, evergreens, sun-glow citruses--and filled to the brim with mouthwatering waves. Perfect encapsulations of both all the Olympic Peninsula is and all that the senses and imagination can make it. It’s reality amplified.

NWSS Lifestylin': Todd Fischer from Eli Odegaard on Vimeo.

Click through for a picture slideshow of Todd and his work. 

Prepping the canvas

In the '60s, Todd's dad Timothy, uncle Tom Fischer, and godfather Dan Anselmo cruised from Seattle out to the Peninsula in an old Cadillac Timothy owned, searching for surf. "It was still just a pioneering kind of an era, where people were exploring the coastline and finding places to surf," Todd says. My dad would "camp under the picnic tables with his friends. It’d be raining, no tent or anything, just hanging out under the picnic table all night. Then they’d go surfing the next day. That was out by Port Grenville just north of Westport, and Ocean Shores. About the center of the Washington coast."

After Todd was born in 1969, Timothy and his wife Jeanne, moved the family out of Seattle to the small town of Othello in eastern Washington. "He tried to raise me up in a good area, a quiet town. You know that’s why they left, moved over there, to get out of the city," Todd says. Despite living on the opposite side of the Cascades, Todd always felt drawn to the Olympic Peninsula and the pounding Pacific waves. A feeling reinforced by family trips to the central Washington coast.

"I don’t think I really went surfing until I was probably 16 and my dad took us out to Westport and we went bodysurfing. No wetsuits or anything, we just went out in our trunks. We had cutoffs, because that’s what was real. We were out there for probably 15 or 20 minutes and I was just loving it and I didn’t want to come in. My lips were blue."

Growing up as the son of a '60s soul surfer, Todd got brainwashed with Beach Boys music early on and it was on vacation in sunny, southern California that Todd caught his first wave on a surfboard. He'd bought his first board--an airbrushed yellow-fade-to-green twin fin Sunset Surfboard's pintail--at Bingo's Surf Shop in Encinitas earlier in the trip. "My dad took me and showed me a lot of the surf spots that he used to surf. We surfed Cardiff," Todd says. "I remember scrambling for the wave and getting into it and I stood up and I was like, 'this is easy.' And I didn’t catch a wave the rest of the trip. I was just hooked after that."

"I just pursued [surfing] because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. At the same time I really liked the feeling that you had and the whole... surrealism. I don’t know what the word is to describe it; I paint it,” he says.”People ask me what it was like to surf and that’s one of the reasons I started painting about surfing and painting surfing subjects, is to describe that feeling I get. "

Timothy Fischer and friends. Photo courtesy of Todd Fischer.

Brush strokes

In the early ‘70s, young Todd flipped through dogeared scrapbooks filled with his parents Timothy and Jeanne's artwork, drawn to the idea that you could capture your imagination on paper. “I got started in [watercolors] because that's what my mom put in front of me that was safe, that wasn't toxic,” Todd says. “Oils don't come out of furniture very well, or acrylics. So she kept me with watercolors at the table.” One of the first watercolors that Todd’s proud of is based on a charcoal sketch of a sailboat at sunset that his dad drew as a young man. 

Life has a way of dropping in on creativity. After high school, Todd continued to paint, but only when he had time on the side. A few paintings per year. Gifts for friends and family. Todd married his sweetheart Geri and had three sons. His dad was a contractor and Todd “ended up turning out to be a plumber,” he says. “I went through my apprenticeship, got my journeyman's card and became a commercial plumber.”

For 15 years he pursued the trade, surfing and painting on the side--even moving the family to the Peninsula to fulfill his lifelong dream of living there. As the economy slowed down and the construction industry collapsed, Todd closed the doors on his plumbing business. “I figured I'd get out before I owed everybody and had to pay them in paintings,” he says.

With work no longer dominating life, Todd picked up the paintbrush to express on canvas what he can’t express in mere words. “I just started painting how it [surfing] made me feel. Things that it brought out in me and things that I enjoyed about it. There’s just all kinds of different variations in surfing, things, topics that you can describe. You can’t describe it in one word. So that’s why I really try to express it in my paintings,“ he says.

Todd at work. Photo by Jens Odegaard.

Framing the piece

The paintings started flowing out of him and piling up around the house. Todd and his dad decided to road trip to the Clean Water Classic in Westport to try and sell some of the paintings. “We were going to go to the surf competition there and sell my art. He ended up dying in July, so it just never went through. I ended up just bagging the whole idea,” Todd says. “Then later on after my mom passed away, I just thought, ‘I'm going to do something. Just go to Westport and hang out.’ So I went and set up at Westport. Right there at the state park and sold a few paintings.” 

Todd sold his first painting, Mystery Rider, at the Clean Water Classic in 2008. It’s a black and white moonlit night-scape of a muscular man sans wetsuit, going toes-to-the-nose down the line on a yellow longboard. “The muscular, big guy, represented my dad or my uncle that I always was inspired by in surfing. I found some new spots to surf up here and kind of took the wave that I really liked and incorporated the two,” Todd says. “He's not wearing a wetsuit, but I think not wearing a wetsuit represents the warmth of the picture. Being someplace warm. The feeling that you get out of a relationship like that. Ya, behind that is my dad. A lot of motivation comes from that. I sold that and it jerked my heart a little bit.”

In addition to Mystery Rider, Todd sold some other prints and postcards. Inspired by the positive feedback from fellow surfers, Todd lined up an art career and dropped in.

Mystery Rider. Photo courtesy of Todd Fischer.

Finishing touches

Todd cleaned out his garage and converted it into a studio. There’s a board rack on one wall stacked with his 10-foot Robert August single fin, 8-foot Stewart, a couple of short boards belonging to his sons, and a South Coast thruster-setup longboard he picked up 16 years ago in Westport. On a table in one corner, there’s a pile of castoff paintings that don’t live up to Todd’s standards--wrong perspectives, color studies, rough drafts--destined for the wood stove that heats the studio during the Olympic Peninsula’s long cold winters when he’s surfing in sleet and snow. His dad Timothy’s longboard with a single hardwood fin polished with use is stashed in the rafters.

Under the lone window framing a sliver of the ocean and beach, a band of evergreens, and then the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains, sits Todd’s draft table. He’s standing there now, contemplating a blank canvas he just affixed to the table with painter’s tape. He reaches up to his right and hits play on the dusty boom box sitting in the corner. A classic rock mixtape--The Beatles and the Beach Boys interspersed with other tunes--flows out of the speakers.

Free Flow, the painting Todd started during this session. Photo courtesy of Todd Fischer.

Todd picks up a charcoal pencil and starts sketching. A river mouth emptying into the ocean comes into view followed by sharp mountain peaks,and evergreen trees splitting the paper horizontally. Concentric swirls for the moon and sun rise above the mountains, mirroring counterparts in the surface of the water. A wave forms where the river flows into the ocean causing the west swell to fold over the south-to-north current rushing off the mountains. It’s how most of the breaks Todd surfs are formed.

Todd trades the pencil out for small brush. He dips it into a masking agent and flicks the hairs of the brush to splatter areas of the water and the sky--after he’s painted, he’ll peel off the agent leaving bubbles of whitewater and pure white stars in a vibrant sky. As the masking dries, he pulls out his palette.

He dips the brush in. The black and white sketch fills with color: sea urchin purples, cold-water greens, starfish yellows, tide-pool blues, the whites of moonglow.

“It’s really a beautiful place out here on the Peninsula. It’s one of the nicest spots on the earth. I see the Peninsula with the mountains and the ocean and I think about what the earth was like when it was made, “ Todd says. “The earth’s beauty is natural and I don’t feel like I can capture that, but I hope that in my art that I can capture the way it makes me feel.”

--Written by Jens Odegaard.  

Find Todd's artwork at toddfischer.net.