Why surfing (and everything) is art.

Hi friends 👋

If you can't tell by my long(ish) hair, laid back demeanor, and the fact that I do this 🤙 with my hands, I like board-sports 😅. I grew up skateboarding, snowboarding, skimboarding, wakeboarding, and kiteboarding (for like 5 seconds until I realized I was scared of open water).

And in last week's Lumastic Live - the weekly live show we do every Friday at 9am to check-in about what's going on with the company - I told my cohost, Joshua, that I was taking a couple days at the end of this month to go learn how to surf.

Now, if you know me, you know that means I've been obsessively watching A LOT of Surf-YouTube. So, in this post, I want to talk about some of the things I've learned about surfing and how it proves that it (and everything) is art.

In the beginning, there was surfing.

Surfing is the origin of all board-sports. It's a centuries old practice, dating back to 12th century Polynesia. It was a point of recreation for early Hawaiians, but was also deeply wrapped in their religion and culture. Shaping a surfboard was a communal experience that involved a sequence of ceremonies leading up to the surfers first ride on the board.

I say this not just cause it's cool - like I definitely would have gone to church if church was surfing - but to show that...

Surfing is an art.

When we discuss what is and isn't art, we usually think only of the visual arts: painting, sculpting, and music. But the true definition of art is so much broader - encompassing anything that is created with emotional or cultural significance. This blog post is art. It might be bad, insignificant art, but it is art.

The cultural significance that surfing has had for nearly a millennium leads us to see that it is an art-form. And if you listen to interviews of professional surfers, behind the "surfs-up brah"s are deep thoughts about how they can adjust their skill and form to better match the waves and the experience they want to create with the ocean for the audience, judges, or themselves. That's the thought process of an artist.

And what's really interesting is...

It's also the thought process of an engineer.

Since industrialization, there has been this growing cultural view that art and engineering are separate fields. The 60s gave us the "scientific" theory that people are "left" or "right" brained - being skilled dominantly in only analytical or visual pursuits. And in the 80s we created the stereotype that those good at math and science have poor social and emotional intelligence - creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for children who grow up attracted to STEM fields.

I don't know why this combative relationship was invented or who benefited from its creation, but what I do know as a student of both the arts and the sciences, is that they are the same.

Just like how saying "surfing is an art" sounds ridiculous at first until you stop and think about it for five seconds, the same is true for engineering. Engineers, designers, makers: these are people who get wrapped up in the pursuit of creating things with emotional and cultural impact.

The only thing that differentiates any of the creative pursuits humans take on is the medium of its expression. What we're blinding ourselves to by seeing art and engineering as separate fields is that both of them are fundamentally the same pursuit.

It all comes back to problem solving.

As humans, we aren't quick and we aren't strong. We survive by using our big-ol-brains to solve problems. We come together, ask questions and identify how something we care about could be better, then we imagine solutions, and finally we learn through failures until we've made one of those solutions real.

Every creative pursuit, whether you want to call it art or not, fundamentally comes down to this - the thing we've evolved to do better than any other animal. It's the thing that makes us special and the thing that makes us feel that our lives are meaningful.

That's why I want to learn how to surf.

Surfing is a way for me to revel in the religious and cultural origins of the other sports I love while being mesmerized by the profound concepts of physics playing out below my feet. It's 30 seconds of feeling the equality of art and engineering by focusing on one problem: having a great ride.

Let's discuss...

We're going to be discussing the intersection of art and engineering in this week's Lumastic Live this Friday @ 9am, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Tweet at me and subscribe to our YT channel to get notified when we go live.

Until next time, Drew