Oceans of emotions

Since he was 5 years old, Josh Seraphin has paddled out to the waves, just waiting for the right ride. It was in all that waiting, bobbing back and forth in the sway of the ocean, that the Huntington Beach resident noticed a unique view of the world, only truly understood at sea level.

Now the artist wants you to see what he sees.

Seraphin took these visions out of the water and put it on canvas for his most recent show, “In the H2O,” an exhibit of more than 10 paintings from a surfer’s point of view.

But don’t expect the typical ocean perspective, Seraphin said.

He’s more of an impressionist than a hyper-realist, he said. His goal is to create a sense of motion, like the swaying of the waves, the self-described action painter said.

Seraphin is well known for his series of photographs, “Sunset Resolution,” which features a year’s work photographing every sunset during 1999 along the Southern Californian coastline. For this show, he again put his camera to use gathering source material for his paintings. After all, you can’t bring an easel out into the water, Seraphin joked.

Often, paddling out hundreds of yards into the surf, toting along a water-proof camera, Seraphin would snap scenes of pelicans, beachgoers and other uncommon views.

It is just something you cannot get standing on the shore, Seraphin said.

Humorously enough, Seraphin’s devotion to art stemmed from a really bad roommate experience at Cal State Chico.

“I became sort of a loner there,” Seraphin said. “I spent a lot of time in my room just doing art.”

Seraphin moved back to Southern California after his first semester, finishing his studies at Cal-State Long Beach.

It felt good to get back home, Seraphin said.

“I just missed the coastline,” he said.

Thirteen years later, the devoted painter and father of a 1-year-old girl, runs his own gallery, still lives by the beach, and surfs whenever possible.

The “H2O” collection gave 33-year-old Seraphin a chance to incorporate the two ideas in one of his favorite pieces, a picture of his daughter playing in the sand.

The work expresses the emotion behind the moment as much as it does the scenery and location, Seraphin said.

These affections appear in every work in the show, which includes images of a pelican soaring over the head of the surfer and a man smack in the barrel of a near-perfect wave. It is the ecstasy of those moments that most people respond to, Seraphin said.

For him, eliciting the feeling of the experience from the painting is as important as the image itself.

“All the time I get people, of course surfers, who have been there and can relate,” Seraphin said. “Then you get people who haven’t been there and they say, ‘That’s what it’s like,’ and they get that feeling, that perspective they can’t have from the shore.”

The show opens with an artist’s reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Seraphin’s gallery, 19400 Beach Blvd., #10, just north of Yorktown Avenue.