Dana Woolfe Art
Dana Woolfe
Dana Wolfe is not just a surfboard artist, as with all of these talented people he does art on anything! Designs it and then creates it to order. You want your board to be different or you want it to stand out in a contest situation, well that’s exactly why you call on guys like Dana. Unbelievable talent.
In Australia, Dana is most known for his work on Mike Davis designs, but his work covers all areas. Below is just a sample of this.
Dana Woolfe story, in his own words, what can be more appropriate.
Airbrush-History
These are the stories I love to read and what I wanted this site to be. Stories and history of the guys behind the scenes, as well as the legends that fronted the many brands. Thanks, Dana for sharing.
I first met Jeff Ho in the mid 60’S when he was making boards in his dad’s garage. He had no car or license at the time and I did – so I became his sidekick and wheelman. We were always driving here and there to visit other creative types to see what they were up to. When Jeff started making boards for more than just a few people, we thought we should come up with a logo and the name, I suggested Jeff Ho Innovations. The boards were totally handcrafted right down to our first stickers, which were hand-drawn with Rapidograph pens on silk span.
Then Jeff came up with an idea for a logo and when I asked what it was he said it was a waxing moon; which was supposed to symbolize a new beginning. The waxing moon is the first phase in the moon’s cycle. Jeff’s drawing was a crescent with bars representing the dark part of the moon. I did one, but it had a face and a 60’s rock poster feel to it.
In the mid 60’s Morey Pope was spraying slip check on the nose of their boards. At first, was just black, then they started doing spraying random ‘Fluro’ colors and throwing some doilies down and then spraying the black, which created some really cool psychedelic patterns. Then someone did the same thing on the foam with paint and glassed over it. Surfboards became bright and colorful, individually crafted pieces of art.
It was about this time Craig ( C. R. ) Stecyk III entered the scene and we started spraying the boards with spray cans with cardboard templates to create the patterns and shapes that were sprayed on the boards. CR took Jeffs logo and turned it so the moon was facing down minimize the bars and put a sperm tail on it and that became the logo for Jeff Ho Zephyr. I later took CR’s interpretation and cleaned it up so that it could be screen-printed and that became the T-shirt logo.
In 1971 we opened The Jeff Ho Shop on Bay and Main in Santa Monica. There were four of us involved: Jeff, Skip Engblom, Craig Stecyk and myself. I did the signage and painted a mural on the side of the building.
One day a friend got his hands on a Michael Hynson rainbow surfboard and brought it in the shop to show us, it had the most beautiful airbrushed deck. That was it I needed to get an airbrush. My first airbrush was a Paasche VL. I started spraying with acrylic lacquer but hated the fumes and was delighted to discover that water-based acrylic would work as well. The only drawback was slow drying times. Later I added a Binks touch-up gun to my kit and a heat gun to speed up drying times.
Late 1971 I was living in a shared house on Bay Street just up from the shop with my friend Wayne Inouya and his girlfriend Elaine Davis, both exceptional surfers. Jeff was spending less time at the shop and I too was losing interest. One of the Bay Street Boys, Adrian Reif had ventured to Guam and was staying with a family we both knew who had a house across the street from my parents. Adrian wrote me a letter telling me that the waves there were epic and uncrowded. So I talked my friends Wayne Inouye and Elaine Davis into packing up and moving to Guam. Indeed the waves were sometimes epic, but only during typhoon season. Adrian had failed to mention the razor-sharp coral, hideous rips and water so warm you couldn’t keep wax on your board. The air there was so hot and humid it felt like it had weight. You could never quite get comfortable and the water offered no relief because it was almost as hot as the air.
Adrian raved about a spot a named Boat Basin as a left that resembled Ala Moana. Indeed it did, but the bowl section at Boat Basin was hideous when it was big and broke on the shallowest part of the reef. The waves were fast and hollow and it also had a rip that traveled like a freight train. On one sizable day Wayne hit the bottom, he came up cut and bloodied and proclaimed, “that’s it I’m out of here, I’m going back to Hawaii.”
When we first arrived on Guam Elaine had been busted at the airport with her smoking herbs and favorite recreational pharmaceuticals. After her arrest, she was put on probation so she couldn’t follow Wayne immediately. Eventually, she managed to have her probation transferred to Hawaii so she was gone as well leaving just Reifer and myself.
Even though Guam was not the tropical paradise I was expecting, I decided to stay. Not long after that, Adrian left as well. I got myself a job at the Continental Hotel as a gardener and that’s where I first met and befriended Greg Ambrose. I’d seen him in the water a few times, but none of the locals ever made an effort to befriend strangers in the water. Greg told me all strangers are his enemy until proven otherwise. Greg employed a technique to keep his perceived enemies at bay, he called it ‘The Nanakuli Death Stare’ which he’d learned on Oahu’s Westside. I guess I proved to be otherwise. Greg turned Guam into an adventure. We surfed a lot of Boat Basin and Rick’s Reef, jumped off waterfalls and went net fishing at lunchtime with the local boys who worked at the hotel. I was on Guam for about 8 months.
I then traveled on to Japan before returning home to California. I traveled to Japan with Masakazu Jackson, another guy I’d made friends with working at the Continental. Mac and I stayed at his grandparent’s house in Tsujido, a Shonan beach town. One day I was out strolling and I came across a surf shop, so I went inside and introduced myself. The owner’s name was Mabo, it was
1972. Little did I know Mabo would be a key character in my Japanese experience yet to come.
On my return to California Jeff had hired a young guy named Bill Urbany to shape boards for him with the Zephyr label. I was no longer associated with the shop and started play around with airbrushing on clothing. Bill started shaping boards for friends on the side and I was asked to spray them. This lead to Bill and I partnering up. Bill quit Zephyr and we made Urbany surfboards. I did some logos for him and of course, airbrushed a lot of the boards he shaped.
Around 1974 Mike Perry and John Orlando had gone to New Zealand and Australia, they came back with tales of perfect sand bottom point breaks, warm water, white sand, and blue skies. I now knew where I was going next. It took a year to earn enough for the trip. When I told Bill I was going he said he wished he was going too. At the time he had a little pickup with a camper shell on the back. I told him to sell the truck and come with me, so he did. We bought an airfare called circle Pacific so we could go anywhere around the Pacific Ocean we wanted, as long as we didn’t double back. So the plan was to travel to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, South East Asia, Japan and back to California.
Wayne and Elaine were now living on the North Shore. We stayed with them for a month or so. Bill made us some Sunset Guns and a couple of more boards to take Down Under.
When we were in New Zealand on the South Island we spotted a little surf shop in the seaside village of Sumner, where we met John and Margaret Warner. We asked if we could make a few boards for them, and were stoked when the answer was yes. We’re now lifelong friends. We stayed in Sumner till Easter when the first snow showed up on the hill back of Christchurch. It was time to move on to Australia.
I bought an old Holden EH wagon as soon as we landed. We had to camp out at the Caravan Park at Narrabeen while I worked on the car to get it roadworthy. During this time we did the rounds in Brookvale. We met brothers Peter Ware and John Ware, kneeboarder and surfboard makers. They let us make some boards in their factory and took us surfing. We also made some boards in Henry’s and Simon Anderson’s factories. Being Winter there wasn’t much workaround so we headed up the coast. A friend back in California suggested that if I stop in Coffs Harbour to look up Bob Cooper, saying he might give me some work – so I did. He indeed gave me work, airbrushing clothing and boards. Bob set Bill up with Scott Dillon. Our intended six moths stay turned into a year. In that time Bob introduced us to a whole lot of people. We did work for Mike Davis, Brian Austin, and Darryl Rooster Dell, just to name a few.
1977 was the first Stubbies contest at Burleigh Heads, and Wayne and Elaine were coming down for the contest as part of the Hawaiian team. Wayne received a dark horse entry but was unfortunate to have MR as his opponent, Wayne lost by a single point.
While the contest was going on, Bill and I scored some work with Brian Furry Austin, Good Times Surfboards. Owl Chapman had talked Furry into letting him shape some Owl Chapman Underground boards. There was one big problem with them, Owl had trouble concentrating for various reasons and only half shaped the boards. Brian had to have one of his guys finish them and told me to spray them saying maybe then he could hopefully sell them. Bill and I told Wayne about our plan to go to Japan and work. We talked him into going with us, we were now the Pro surfer, the shaper and the airbrusher. Wayne said he had met this guy named Doji Isaka in Hawaii and that he would most likely give us the ‘In’ we were looking for.
Once in Japan, Doji took us on and we were now a part of the Cosmic Surfboard team. The Factory was located in Fujisaw one town over from Tsujido. There were three factories in this area – all right next to each other: Cosmic, Drop Out and Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt was owned by none other than Mabo, the Surf Shop owner I met in 72.
While I was working at Cosmic Edo Ogawa from Drop Out told me next year you come to work for me. Japan had been a blast so I took him up on his offer. At the end of the Cosmic gig Wayne returned to Hawaii, Bill went back to California and went back to Australia to work for Cooper.
Bob usually had plenty on from September to January, but after that things slowed down. So I venture up the coast and do a few weeks at a handful of factories. First stop would be Byron and Sky. Then I moved up to the Gold Coast, I did work for Good Times, Burford and Brothers Neilsen. I would work till the Stubbies came around and then would head down to Bells. On the way, I would stop in Kiama and spay a few boards for Mike Davis. After the Bells Contest, it was back to Japan. I did this routine for about three years. I think my best work came out Coopers, Sky and Mike Davis.
In 1980 I had a shot at getting a ‘permanent residency’ visa that would allow me to call Australia home. But there was one catch I had to return to California to wait for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to turn. During this time it gave me an opportunity to do some more work with Bill Urbany.
In1982 I returned to Australia and Coffs Harbour. I wanted to get work as a plumber, but the housing market had just gone bust and there was a glut of tradesman. So I opened a shop painted a mural on it and called it Air Waves. I airbrushed T’Shirts did some paints on canvas and huge them on the walls of the shop. It lasted about two-years: My young wife from Guam had come to the conclusion that I had taken her from one Island to another. She wanted to go back to L.A. She said I could not go with her because I would be as miserable there as she was here. She was right, so I stayed and she left. Not long after I sold the shop set up a little silkscreen factory doing stickers and T’Shirts it was a hard slog. That winter when things were slow I went to Perth with Brett Munro, We worked out of the Surfboards West factory. I sprayed boards and did logo work for various people.
I came back to Coffs and when next winter came around again I got on the plane back to Japan. It was 1985 and this time I was working freelance out of the old Lightning Bolt factory, where some of the guys from Cosmic and Bolt had banded together and formed Oasis. I did T’Shirt artwork for Mabo, he also took me to Tokyo and got me a couple of gigs doing logos. I also did artwork for Coast Line Surf Shop and I painted a mural on the wall of the Proud Mary Surf Shop.
In the late 80’s mural art on surfboards was no longer the thing and surf shops had become clothing stores that stocked a few boards. I had graduated to doing my graphics work on a computer. In the 90’s I got a job at TAFE teaching Desk Top Publishing and Computer Graphics. I did this for more than twenty- years. My airbrush lived in a box in a draw not seeing the light day during the period.
Then a couple of years ago Mike Davis posted on Facebook that had been given a gig doing a series of stingers and other retro boards. I commented that he needed an air-brusher. “Let’s get the band back together. Put your airbrush where your mouth is!” he snapped. So of course, I took him up on the offer and I did about fourteen unique boards for him. It had been close to thirty years since I last had used spray equipment. At first, it felt a bit daunting but it didn’t long to get in the groove again and by all accounts, everyone loves their boards.
