Artist Quentin Curry Finds Lawless Freedom In Surf, On Canvas, And Back Again

Surfing is not what people read in the magazines — at least not through Quentin Curry’s eyes, as he scans the horizon, or through his body, pressed flat against the board, or through his hands as they cut the water, propelling him forward.

And at least not through his being, as he inhales, holds his breath for a moment, and exhales, catching his wave.

In practice, surfing is a meditation, a sport that embodies the bigger picture of space, time and existing in nature — and the ability to navigate “what she unpredictably throws at us,” the 49-year-old said.

“It’s an adaptive kind of place, where it forces you to be in the present moment, which really is, kind of, like the Holy Grail of experience, because very few things force you into the present moment,” he said. “Usually, you have to be there. So this one allows you to just be there by circumstance.”

Perhaps above all, it was the lawless freedom that drew him into surfing — a reliance on instinct, natural ability and trust in himself — which is also what he saw within art, he explained while sitting in his studio, a circa-1880s barn with high ceilings, flooded by natural light, its wooden floorboards spattered with paint — a canvas unto itself.

“There’s something exhilarating and unknown about it that, really, is the driving force for painting and for surfing,” he said. “It’s like a brand-new day, every day, to explore these new challenges and opportunities, and then develop languages within, whether it’s my surfing style or the way I’m using my brushes and the paint that I’m using. And environment is one of the great backdrops to any artist.”

Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Curry spent most of his youth landlocked — skiing, skateboarding and playing in the Appalachian Mountains when he wasn’t in school — until his father accepted a job as a ranch manager in Florida. There, he learned how to catch wild hogs and alligators with his hands, and started driving well before age 16.

“I, basically, was a nature boy,” Curry said, adding, “That led to this character that I was building, I guess. It was a little bit of a rogue, wild side to me. I had also gone to boarding schools, which did civilize me a bit.”

After a private school kicked him out of first grade for disregarding school rules, he attended public school and leaned into skateboarding subculture, even opening his own skate shop, Air Bear Sports, out of his garage when he was 13. He liked beer and vodka, and he took his first hit of cannabis, which burned off his eyelashes and nose hairs.

In 1987, he was sent to a reform boarding school in Connecticut and, two years later, a different school in New Hampshire, before landing at Putney High School in Vermont, which proved to be revolutionary. The 17-year-old learned how to paint and sculpt — “skinny dipping and LSD brought me into my own,” he added — and he spent the weekends living in a cabin in the woods behind his Latin teacher’s house.

“That was the super-coolest melting pot that happened to me in my thought and belief of becoming an artist,” he said. “That’s where that flame was ignited, as a certain rogue character that thinks and works with his hands, and has endless potential that hasn’t been confined or defined by society.

“It was more of a lawless freedom that I really saw within painting,” he continued, “which also drew me into surfing and the waves of Long Island.”

From picking up a surfboard for the first time at age 13 — or, rather, borrowing it from his cousin without permission, and swiftly breaking it — it would be nearly 25 years before Curry tried surfing again in 2009.

“Once I started, I would devote as much energy as I had in me, every day, to it,” he said, adding, “Surfing is more than just the cover shot. It’s the environment and context, the set and setting.”

It was that same year he and his wife, fashion designer Shelley Suh, bought a former cinderblock factory in Sagaponack, which once belonged to artist David Porter, and transformed the dilapidated main building into their home, where they live with their children, 12-year-old Cybelle and 9-year-old Mason, their dog, Rock Sand, and a pair of fish.

The barn would become Curry’s studio. And he came to see the beaches as what he calls “family meeting rooms” — places for conversation and connectivity with friends, and hyper-awareness on the waves or in the water, he said, all without distraction.

There, on Ditch Plains, he built his “surfer’s eye,” which he describes as an eye to see opportunity. “And that opportunity is to be able to visualize yourself surfing the wave by standing on shore, basically,” he said, “and if you can do it, you can find ways wherever you’re at.”

It took him three years to develop and trust his eye enough to move to other beaches, discover new surf spots, and surrender to mindfulness on the waves.

“We get so bombarded with the clustering of ideas in our daily life, whether it’s the pool, the kids, the bills, all these dispersions of real concentration,” Curry said. “Once you’re able to flush those out, just because you need to survive, it allows you to go into a whole new place within the same place that we’re occupying every day. That new place that it creates, it lingers with you, after you come back on land.”

On a routine Sunday morning in March 2020, Curry headed down to one of his favorite local breaks with a friend. The waves were cranking, he said, in the 8-to-10-foot range. It was a perfect day, until a set of waves came in and sucked the water out around his feet, sinking his ankles into the sand as another huge wave crashed.

“I tried to duck underneath the explosion, but the explosion caught me as I was ducking, so it compressed my whole body into my feet. I heard the pop and it was just like, I was done,” he said.

“But that led into, you know, discoveries.”

Confined to his home and studio with a broken foot, Curry jumped into the trenches of at-home learning with his children during the COVID-19 pandemic, and dropped into an intentional place of reflection with his art, revisiting a repetitive, free-form doodle of a crude figure with a surfboard that he sketched while on a phone call five years earlier.

Something about it was now full of curiosity, he said.

“I realized I wanted to work that theme into my work and use that as a springboard for what was happening in the water and this place of excitement,” he said. “And I wanted to merge the two of them.”

Openly playing with paint and color, this discovery took on a life of its own, he said, and the surfer motif is now a mantra in his artistic practice — one he returns to time and time again. It allows him to flow mercurially, unpredictably, in any direction the painting suggests, not unlike the movement of a wave, he said.

With it comes a freedom to explore color, form, gesture and subject, finding malleability in the act of painting — an exercise in lawless freedom.

Two months after his injury, Curry grabbed his board and got back in the water — “a beautiful oasis in a world of trouble,” he said. And while the ocean had always served as an escape and a place of inspiration, he felt his surfer’s eye expand into an artist’s eye — the waves a source of immense feeling to express and explore, he said.

“Ultimately, the narrative has gotten more focused,” he said. “I have spent the last two and a half years really diving into what I would call the loose underpinnings of the ‘salt life.’ It really encompasses this whole experience.”