Albin Conkey
I was born in New England, but my parents moved our family to the Caribbean—St. John, in the US Virgin Islands—from the time I was 2 until age 10. My earliest memories are watching my dad, Albin Conkey, handbuild the house that we lived in. He was a really scrappy builder and he assembled all the materials he needed for the house at a dock in Florida, and then sent them in a shipping container to St. John. The house had a tin roof and it was painted hot pink with teal-colored gingerbread trim. Now that I’m renovating a house of my own here in Maine, I’m dumbfounded by the level of creativity that went into my dad using makeshift materials to build something that could withstand hurricanes. It taught me from a very early age that you can make things, and it doesn’t have to be this long arduous process. Those years also launched my fascination with the ocean. I remember seeing surfers and surfboards for the first time there, and drawing whatever I was seeing at the beach on brown construction paper with my mom.
Brimfield Flea Market
People come from Japan, California, and all over the world for the Brimfield Flea Market in Massachusetts. It spans acres and acres, and during my adolescence it was my main cultural museum. When we moved back to Maine, my parents set up their own booth there every year. My dad would sell architectural antiques and my mom would sell vintage paintings, which left me free to roam the aisles and take everything in. I hate to use Instagram or Tumblr as an analogy, but, during that time period, walking the rows at Brimfield was the only place I could mainline all these cultural artifacts in one place. I would see an old Matisse print, but it would be sitting next to a George Foreman grill—the same way that now, online, you might see some annoying meme next to a beautiful Hockney painting. Growing up, Maine felt very far from California, which was the center of skateboarding and surfing, and Brimfield is where I could go to see whatever discarded cultural elements landed there from the west coast. The main thing that left an impression on me were the vintage surf mags. I remember looking at Severson’s art, Wave Warriors ads, and all the colorful surf movie posters of the ’60s and ’70s.
Arthur Russell
I need music when I’m working and I listen to a wide range of stuff, but the reason I’m choosing Arthur Russell—and what resonates beyond just his music—is the fact that he was kind of an outsider to the music world. He was from the Midwest originally, which is not somewhere you’d associate with disco anthems or a lot of the other music he made. He grew up surrounded by cornfields, but his music transports you somewhere else. For me, growing up on a horse farm in Maine and now designing work for surf brands in California and Hawaii, I’m really inspired by the way Russell had unexpected influences that clearly aren’t part of his own personal origins.
Kamakura, Japan
I went to Kamakura, Japan, for the first time in 2009. I met a surfer from there through my friends at Grain Surfboards in Maine, and he encouraged me to come visit. I left what I thought was the smallest apartment ever where I was living at the time in Brooklyn, and as soon as I got to Japan I realized, “Oh, I actually had a big apartment.” Until then, I also never thought much of the surf in Maine, but seeing how stoked surfers in Japan were with even less favorable conditions totally changed my perspective. The parking lot surf scene there is amazing—guys tailgating with all their gear laid out, smoking cigarettes, cooking on little hibachi grills on the seawall. I’ve always been inspired by Japan’s graphic design, architecture, and paintings, and if there is such a thing as having a past life, Kamakura is definitely where I’m from. Since that first trip, I’ve gone back almost every year, sometimes twice a year, and it’s cool to see friends there get married and start having kids now.
Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing
Magazines are one of my favorite forms, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing has to be one of my favorite publications of all time. It was founded by the artist Leonard Koren and based in Los Angeles. The whole “gourmet bathing” concept for the magazine was a celebration of all the ways humans interact with water—whether that’s surfing, an extravagant Esalen retreat, hanging out by the pool, hopping in a lake, or going to a bathhouse. The magazine only ran from the late ’70s to early ’80s, but it had great design and featured all these amazing people including Ed Ruscha, Matt Groening, David Byrne, and Jimmy Ganzer. There’s a coffee table book that I’d highly recommend called Making Wet, where you can see a lot of the original work from the magazine. It’s very inspiring from a design perspective, but it’s also just a reminder that so much of what I value about surfing is the restorative power of returning to water.
For more about Ty Williams, read TSJ 34.5’s “Economy of Line,” by Matthew B. Shaw.
