ABOUT THE 2010 ARTIST:  JOHN VANHAMERSVELD

This 39th Annual Dana Point Festival of the Whales poster image was a moment for me in the late summer of 2009. There is a story behind the making of the image poster for the annual event. Ironically I lived in Dana Point when I was 20 thru 23 years old in the early 60s where my international career started one afternoon in 1963. The town had a population of 17,000 people then with their ocean society of surfers and fishermen. The surf industry was beginning its commercial marketing of surf themes and products like Surfer Magazine where I worked each day with John Severson. There was a Paul Allen that I had met through the advertising of Bruce Brown Films. Paul and I hung out together. One day we talked about a surf movie Bruce Brown was making and it needed a movie advertising campaign. From those early meetings came the "The Endless Summer Poster" now known around the world for decades and the icon for surfing.

Today I have designed an image for a local Dana Point group that puts on the Festival of the Whales. I live and work in Santa Monica, and work around the world in a global business of making and selling images. So, all seems to have come around again as I have been focusing back upon my childhood when I lived by the ocean and paddled, swam, and surfed around Luanda Bay and the Palos Verdes Bluff Cove, and the beach cities close by off the edge of the peninsula. In the process of working on this drawing I was thinking of sitting in the ocean water on a misty late afternoon as the late sun was going down. As if I was the artist Rockwell Kent I was thinking of a simple icon to tell a story about a time when Whales passed by in the spring season. It is so soundless in the middle of the ocean, as the Whale and the tail slip into the blue water, the headland in the distance, the sun burning through the mist. These colors capture the surreal, serene, ethereal moment we can see as a human in the ocean world. The Whales are an ancient being and generations pass by the Dana Point every year in their eternal passage of their lifetime. 

This version of the Whale Poster is of museum quality and has a great vibe about the Ocean as a mystical place, a sacred space for ones thoughts in a dream.

Links to more on John Vanhamersveld:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=john+van+hamersveld&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=fcFIS4-BMJOKNMz-1JAJ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCYQsAQwAw


 http://www.vanhamersveldmuseumofart.com/vhmoa/museum/index.html


http://www.post-future.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Van_Hamersveld

http://hidale.com/2009/07/14/john-van-hamersveld-and-alida-post-bring-summer-of-69-to-vegas/