An aristocrat of surfing
Roy Stewart has the courage to question and distill the spirit of surfing and understand it as the source of his work. "What is essential to surfing?" is a question he asks himself constantly. Flight, maximum speed, an aspiration to perfect efficiency, and unity with the energy of the wave is what his work pursues, and that ( to resucitate from defilement an important word so ruthlessly raped and rendered meaningless by the surfing world) is radical, meaning pertaining to the root.
Roy's boards are beautiful because they are true organic works. Organic here means that an object's purpose, apearance, structure, material, method of construction, performance and even symbolic potential are tightly woven into a cohesive but infinitely flexible whole, conceived after great analytical and synthetic effort of the imagination in an attempt to create, however modestly a man is able to, as nature does.
Elegance defines Roy Stewart surfboards : the use of foil sections for templates; having considerable area with significant rocker forward, creating an optimum configuration to get up and planing as soon as possible; a narrow tail for maximum control and rail to rail ease which works mostly in displacement, supplemented by the efficiently generated lift from the fins in a brilliant balance of the best of many worlds; the tunnel fin as a slave foil, lifting smoothly as needed without resisting roll and the deep elliptical fins generating upward lift when canted to the horizon. It is nourishing to see his true dynamic, three dimensional understanding of the elements involved in wave riding, as opposed to the usual resorting to convenient abstractions which ring so much like fundamentalist praying and show no understanding of wave dynamics.
In construction the Stewart parallel profile method achieves haiku depth, opening up powerful flexibility and lively resonance.
Being one with the wave is the essence of surfing, it is radical, it goes to the root, and it is heir to Duke Kahanamoku's spirit. Roy Stewart's boards are unsettling, but the spirit behind them, their source, what he is saying through them that surfing should be, is even more so. His boards caused a stir in Hawaii by expressing surfing's lost vital essence, the one which the great Duke valued more highly than his olympic gold medals.
by Pablo Diaz
