Surf Mama

SURF MAMA

2011-11-15T13:09:00.000Z

Womans Hour

2011-11-11T13:34:00.000Z

Interview on Woman's Hour click here to listen

Presented by Jane Garvey. A new report has found that long working hours are proving detrimental to the family life of new MPs - should parliament be more family friendly? Reinventing yourself after 40: Wilma Johnson on surfing in Biarritz; Madeleine Peyroux sings live in the studio and sleep deprivation when you have young children.

Presented by Jane Garvey. A new report has found that long working hours are proving detrimental to the family life of new MPs - should parliament be more family friendly? Reinventing yourself after 40: Wilma Johnson on surfing in Biarritz; Madeleine Peyroux sings live in the studio and sleep deprivation when you have young children.

This was a little nerve wracking as I've been listening to Womans Hour since I was about 12. I did keep telling myself that only a few million people would be listening but somehow it didn't help......
But luckily Jane Garvey loved boogie boarding in South Wales, and even knew the beach where I had my first terrifying surf in a blizzard!

Surfers Path Review

2011-11-11T10:50:00.001Z

SURF MAMA

« Do you ever get the feeling that you’vewalked into the wrong movie set ? » is how Wilma’s mum-with-attitudeautobiography begins. In her own telling of it, she’s supposed to be a famousartist, though she’d just spent over a decade « playing earth mother »on the west coast of Ireland with her surf-obsessed husband, also an artist,raising three small children. She had ducks, chickens and a veg garden,occasional shows in London, but no surfing in her life. At some point Wilmadecides to change that. The family move to Biarritz and the rest is Wilma’shistory. She casts a wry, often hilarious eye on her world, setting the mundaneagainst the bigger pictures of desire, the past, existential possibilities,wine, espressos and surf. Her paintings are wild, expressive, challenging youwith a cocktail of femininity, brashness and deep thoughtfulness – somewhere betweenFrida Kahlo, Gauguin and – well, Wilma. She’s a true artist and her book paintsa bright picture of surfing from an entirely original angle. Viva Wilma !

SURF GIRL WINTER 2011

2011-11-10T09:42:00.000Z

Interview in Winter Issue of SURF GIRL

WILMA – SURF MAMA

WRITTEN BY: SURFGIRL ON DECEMBER 6, 2011 NO COMMENT

Wilma is an artist who decides having never done any sport in her life decided to drag her three kids off to Biarritz, swopping her husband for a surfboard in the process. This year she wrote about her transformation from an unfit wife to a surfing divorcee in her book Surf Mama and illustrated it with her beautiful paintings. SurfGirl gets the Wilma lowdown…

So Wilma, when did you start painting?
I’ve painted since I was a little girl – I was inspired by my uncle who was an artist. He was very eccentric and charismatic and made his own clothes out of sheepskin and carved tables out of tree trunks. He used to let me watch him paint in his studio or on the beach. It seemed like a really amazing to be able to do, so I started painting to create my own fantasy world when I was bored.

Do you now earn a living from painting?
It’s not easy when you’re a single mother with three kids and a neoprene habit! It’s a bit of a gamble – you work your guts out for a show and you never know until the opening night if you’re going to sell everything or nothing at all. I was on a bit of a losing streak, so I decided to write the book, which has been great.
What’s really funny is that I sometimes felt a bit guilty leaving the studio to go surfing – but in the end it was a good career move because since the book came out, the prices of my paintings have gone up!

As a naturist what’s the most outrageous thing you’ve done?
Hmm, where to begin? Sometimes I look back and wonder how I did it! It could be appearing in nothing but body paint at the Royal Opera House, or a week long live-in performance in a London art gallery where people used to come and watch us cooking breakfast naked, or maybe flashing in the British museum!

What attracted you to surfing?
I think it was that Old Spice ad with Carmina Burana playing in the background! I never thought I’d actually do it, it seemed like something that happened in California or Hawaii. Then I married a surfer, but he completely put me off by taking me out in a blizzard in a huge swell in South Wales. (I think he might have done it on purpose so I’d be the one staying back on the beach with the kids!) Then I ended up living in Guethary so close to the ocean that I could see this beautiful wave from my bed… I thought if I don’t do it now, I never will.

Was becoming a surfer one of your biggest challenges?
Yes definitely, I’d never done much sport and was 44 and totally unfit when I started. I’m not sure how I kept going actually, it took me months to stand up, and I used to come out of the water black and blue.

What’s it like living in France?
Guethary is just outside Biarritz and it’s really the Basque country, so it’s nothing like you might imagine a little French village – a million miles from A Year in Provence. It’s also right on the border with Spain – I went down to San Sebastian for breakfast this morning because I was a bit bored!

What’s the biggest surf you’ve been in?
I used to be terrified when it got over about a foot, but I’ve surfed a few overhead waves now which is pretty exciting. Guethary gets enormous, but my limit is about a metre and a half – although I sometimes go out when it’s bigger just to watch and keep my adrenalin levels up. It breaks a long way out, so it’s easy to underestimate the size and arrive out there feeling like you’ve been dropped into a gnarly surf movie by helicopter.

What’s the best thing that’s happened to you since you took up surfing?
Getting to my feet was a big moment, because it took me months, but I was still in the white water with the Mamas surf club. So I think when I got good enough to paddle out to Guethary alone and take a wave without anyone holding my hand. It still feels faintly miraculous every time I do it.

Any regrets?
Living on an empty point break in Ireland for ten years and never getting in the water!

Surf Mama by Hugo Williams

2011-11-09T15:28:00.000Z

Speaking at Port Eliot after arriving by river

TLS Freelance

HUGO WILLIAMS

Someone else who once took delivery of a superbike, although they weren't called that then, was Peregrine Eliot, Earl of St Germans, founder of Port Eliot Lit Fest and the Elephant Fayre rock festival before it. I first met Perry astride his bike outside a house in Pavilion Road in the 1960s, It was an Indian, I think, which were second only to Harley Davidsons, or may have been above them. I remember being impressed by its copper piping and Red Indian figurehead. I doubt if Perry is a fan of Fred's poems, although his Harley-Davidson stands, like Fred's in its factory, on an altar in the famous Round Room at Port Eliot. An Earl with the power to stop trains at the station named after him would surely appeal to Fred Seidel. A recent kidney transplant recipient, Perry is transformed from the skinny, shaking figure of a few years back into an earlier robust incarnation of himself, careering round his magnificent property on a quad bike and going to Hawaii in the winter to watch waves.

His love of the big surf - his son was a champion surfer before his premature death -may account for the presence on the Festival programme of the artist Wilma Johnson. It was cold this year, with plenty of festival mud and rain, but this did not stop Wilma from paddling down the river on a surfboard in order to arrive, muddy and wet, with a fur flung over her bathing costume, at the Idler Academy tent for the launch of her book Surf Mama. "I had to arrive on a surfboard to make me feel calm", she said.

Wilma is an artist in the Frida Kahlo mould; her wild, expressionistic pictures feature stylized self-portraits in different racial disguises and settings, depending on what has been going on in her life, in the present case surfing in Biarritz. At the age of forty-two, after ten years of surf widowhood watching her husband surfing from beaches in Ireland, she took her three children off to France, swapped a painting for a longboard and promptly broke several bones fairing to stand up on it. "With the rest of my life in chaos, I convinced myself that everything would fall into place if I could just stand on a wave. I was terrified, watching the waves from my bed, until I was told that one way or another you'll always be washed in to shore. It took me a year to learn." It was then she set up the Mamas Surf Club to get more women in the water. I remember her long ago turning up at parties in nothing but body paint as part of a gatecrashing performance art group called "The Neo-Naturist Cabaret", so the dame has form.

………….

High 50

2011-11-05T11:40:00.000Z

Babe of Biscay

Inspired by a Surf Mama, Oliver Bennett discovers the delights of Biarritz, now the hottest surf draw in France

Man over board? Not for Wilma Johnson. Photo by Oliver Bennett

At sea, a line of surfers straddle wild, white-topped waves. Back on the stately Quai de la Grande Plage, wetsuit-clad surf-bums stroll alongside ladies with lapdogs. It is time for that great French unifying ritual: lunch.

I’m in the grand old resort of Biarritz, expecting to find the pomp and stuffiness of retired nobility. Instead, I discover France’s top surfer hangout, and a beguiling mix of the regal and the raffish. In prime position on the south-western French Atlantic coast, on the Côte Basque, the town forms the apex of one of the best-loved stretches of French seaside. Long beaches, buffeted by the Bay of Biscay’s winds, lead all the way to the Spanish border.

Biarritz still boasts the stately old buildings that attracted luminaries including Queen Victoria and Napoleon III in the late 19th century. By the 1970s, it had become a little too stuck in the past. Now, the town is France’s comeback kid, fashionable with the natives as well as foreign hipsters.

“The surfing has really bought the energy back,” a local hotelier told me. Companies such as Ripcurl and Billabong now have their national headquarters in Biarritz. It’s home from home for Karl Lagerfeld and chef Alain Ducasse, and currently hosts Londoner Wilma Johnson, 51, artist and author of a new memoir, Surf Mama (Beautiful Books, £8.99).

Wilma took up surfing at 40, after a move to the region and a split marriage. With Johanna, a Swedish friend, she set up the Mamas Surf Club for women (their motto: “Out of the kitchen and into the surf”) and her life fell into place. “Once I learned to surf, none of the rest of it seemed to matter any more,” she says.

Wilma showed me Guéthary, the prime surf village south of Biarritz, where the breaks are at their most magnificent. I gazed at the sea galloping in, then explored the leisurely resort behind, a scene replete with well-heeled maisons secondaires, many of them the fashionable Basquaise houses with eyebrow gables and ox-blood beams that look for all the world like a splash of Surrey en France. After watching a furious game of pelota in the centre – think Basque squash with added machismo – I went for a beer before heading back to Biarritz for lobster and muscadet.

The current allure of the Côte Basque means that traffic along the corniche throbs all summer. To escape a particularly steamy lunchtime jam, I nosed into Bidart, a hilltop vantage point that looks over the sea on one side, and the foothills of the Pyrenees on the other. (There’s another thing about the Côte Basque: you can surf and ski on the same day and have foie gras for lunch.) That afternoon, I headed into the hills and strolled through wildflower-strewn Alpine pastures, where the only sounds were tinkling cowbells and the distant roar of the sea.

It was tempting to try the famous Atlantic-to-Mediterranean GR10 walk, but I’d leave that for another day as I’d been told by Wilma that St-Jean-de-Luz, close to the Spanish border, was the kind of heaven-sent, easygoing French town that makes you start looking involuntarily in local estate agents’ windows.

I drove in, found a café on the wide bay, and watched couples pad down to the beach in white toweling dressing gowns. St-Jean’s seafront Helianthal Hotel is a thalassotherapy spa and, in the early evening, the beach turns into a living brochure photograph. For a couple of days I swam, ate seafood, enjoyed the surf and remembered Wilma saying: “This could be the California of Europe”. She’s right, you know.

Oliver has worked at several newspapers and magazines including the travels desks of the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Business magazine at the Financial Times, Creative Review and numerous other journals. He works for the University of Falmouth in the MA Writing department, and has a long list of corporate clients. Oliver lives in central London with his blended family of partner and two children. He enjoys art, culture, film, food and hanging out in foreign cities, and thinks creativity, optimism and acceptance are vital for growing old happily.

Interview on Radio Gorgeous

2011-11-01T12:17:00.000Z

Interview on Radio Gorgeous click here to listen

From surf-widow to surf-addict: artist Wilma Johnson talks to Josephine Pembroke about reinventing herself after 40.

A former member of the Neo-Naturist art group in the 80s, Wilma now creates her own bright very colourful usually figurative art about her life. She married an avid surfer, Nick, had 3 children, and moved to Ireland. Age 40 Wilma had a life changing moment when she decided if you can’t beat them you better join them… So she jumped on a surf board and has loved the waves ever since! She now lives by the most famous surf beach in Europe Hosagor where she daily catches those giant Atlantic waves. Her beautiful book ‘Surf Mama’ is out now, and illustrated with her artwork.

Wigtown Book Festival

2011-09-23T09:49:00.000+01:00

WilmaJohnson

SurfMama

CountyBuildings

1.30pm| £7

Aged 40, with three children andliving on Ireland’s West Coast, Wilma Johnson decided to move to Biarritz andbecome a surfer. Ten years on she’s still there, braving the waves with theSurf Mamas, who choose cold, neoprene suits over cocktail dresses. Aninspirational tale of how one woman found life on a board. Sponsored by ReadingLasses Bookshop and Cafe

Irish World Review

2011-08-26T16:12:00.000+01:00

New book tells house-bound housewives how it is possible to ditch the dishes and sort out a life.

If you are a middle-ages mother striving to do something more than making your children dinner in the evenings and then sitting down to watch your favourite soap, then give Surf Mama a read and you are sure to find some inspiration for what some might call a mid-life crisis but Wilma Johnson calls a revelation.

Wilma Johnson, author of Surf Mama, writes about her desire to become a surfer. Growing up in North London and being part of the New Romanticism scene, she grew close to the artistic way of life. But ten years later, when she receives a twentieth school reunion invitation whilst living with her husband and three children in the west of Ireland, she decides enough is enough and puts together plans to move to Biarritz, France, internationally famous for its beaches and surfing.

In her book, Wilma writes ‘Alarm bells start ringing...it must be my biological clock telling me it’s time for a mid-life crisis. I hear a little voice in my head saying, “No, I can’t be too old.” It gets a bit louder “NO, I can’t accept this”’

This alone inspiring many women, and men as well, to get out there and get involved, even if they think they are too old!

As well as incredibly funny and witty writing, Johnson invites all of her readers in to her life as if they are her closest friends. Surf Mama is perfectly accompanied with various paintings and art work, as she is an artist first and foremost, that delight the eyes of the readers as well as perfectly capturing the essence of the book.

This light-hearted yet hard-hitting book is definitely top on my list of recommendations, and I tell anyone with a sense of humour to read this for inspiration, or just for a bit of a laugh!

By Roseanna Boyle

Review in Surf Girl

2011-08-17T13:22:00.000+01:00

Surf Girl Magazine

I was on a windswept beach on the west coastof Ireland when I had the revelation that I wanted to become a surfer. »Andso begins Wilma’s book Surf Mama. You could be mitaken in thinking from theopening line that this is just another wannabe surfer story of someone with amid life crisis. But it’s more than that, it’s funny, insightful and Wilma turnsout to be a pretty entertaining woman. Wilma is an artist who decides havingnever done any sport in her life, to drag her three kids to Biarritz, swappingher husband for a surfboard in the process. The story then follows Wilma’sjourney to becoming a surfer whilst bringing up her three kids on her own andkeeping her career going, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. But convinced thatif only she could get the hang of surfing, the rest of her life would fall intoplace she perseveres. Along the way she sets up the Mamas Surf Club, for womenwho felt they spent too long watching the action from their beach towels. « Outof the kitchen and into the surf » is their motto.

The book is full of amusing storiesbout beinga woman in the surfing world and a wonderful insinght into living in the PaysBasque and is also illustrated with Wilma’s beautiful paintings.

24th Letter, New York .... Mother Love and other stuff

2011-08-13T15:44:00.000+01:00

Mother Love

Surfing is, by and large, a young boys’ club.But in her early 40s, Wilma johnson, an artist and single mother of three,decided to jumpstart her initiation process into the surfing world by tradingone of her paintings for a proper board. Moving to Biarritz from a remotevillage on Ireland’s west coast, Johnson took up a pastime that ultimatelybecame as much of a lifestyle as a hobby. Surf Mama, is Johnson’s account ofher unlikely foray into the macho , youth-driven world of wave riding.Augmented by the author’s own lush, colorful illustrations, the memoir-cumscrapbook serves as a worthy call to get out of the kitchen and into the water.

Mail on Sunday Review

2011-07-24T14:22:00.000+01:00

With her marriage in tatters and her career infree fall, artist Wilma Johnson packed her bags and headed to chic Biarritz tobecome a Surfing Mama.

There are moments in your life when you stopand wonder how you ended up where you are. I had one of those moments the otherday. I was sitting half a mile out to sea in the Bay of Biscay on a 9ft pieceof fibreglass watching the waves crash around me. I was alone except for someseagulls and there was a thunderstorm moving in from Biarritz.

But I was enjoying the moment. After all, I’ma surfer and this is what I do for fun. Soon hail stones the size of ice cubescame tipping down, and the lightning moved closer.

I got the next wave in and drove home in mywetsuit to face the disapproval of my three teenage children. I felt as if Iwas the teenager and I’d just walked in at 5 am with smudged lipstick and anempty tequila bottle in my hand.

THey are now used to me disappearing to catchthe swell before they get up, or leaving notes on the table saying, « Gonesurfing. Pizza in freezer. Back at high tide. »

But I still get in trouble.The other day Iwent to a meeting with my daughter’s teachers. As we walked out of theschool,she gave me a dark look that is a speciality of teenage girls who readTwilight, the vampire novels of Stephanie Meyer.

« What’s the matter, did I say somethingwrong ? » I asked.

« No, you have seaweed in yourhair ! » came the reply.

I know it must have been a bit of a shock atfirst when I turned myself from a scone-baking mother into a slightly obsessivesurf chick. I’m a fifty year old artist from London and, despite the fact thatI have probably paddled the distance from her to Hawaii over the last fewyears, my biceps are still not visible to the naked eye.

I was pushing the recommended starting age forthe sport by at least thirty years and am about as far as you could be from aclassic surf junkie. I went to private school in London and my father had ahigh powered job in the City. There were ballet lessons, a chocolate labradorand a Volvo estate car.

The transformation happened when I arrived inBiarritz – the classiest beach resort in France – with rusty schoolgirl frenchand a Marks and Spencers bikini.My life was in chais, my marriage had endedafter 15 years, my artistic career was in free fall and I had three children tolook after.

Before the move, I’d spent my life avoidingsport. But here I spent hours watching the surf from the safety of my beachtowel with a wine cooler by my side, and I was fascinated. As the surferscarved elegant lines of spray in their wake, I became gripped by anirresistible desire to also ‘walk on water.’

There was something seductive about thesetting, of course. Biarritz is a mix of hardcore surfing and glamour. Some ofthe boggest waves in the world break on the reefs, but the atmosphere still hasa taste of the decadence of the Belle Epoque. I’ve sometimes had a glass ofchampagne thrust in my hand before I’ve even got my wetsuit off.

My surfing fate was sealed in a bar over tapasand rioja. Phil Grace is one of those men who has lived the dream of theclassic sixties surf film Endless Summer. He said he’d like to commission apainting.

« Would you like to swap it for aboard ? » I asked.

« Sure’, he said, sounding surprised,« I didn’t know you surfed. »

Of course he could tell I didn’t.

« I don’t yet, but I thought I mightstart. You don’t think I’m too old do you ? » I was dreading theanswer.

« Not if you want to do it – go for it.You’re quite fit aren’t you ? »

« Oh yes, » that was probably the riojatalking.

Opinion was divided on whether it waspossible.When I asked surfers, they muttered darkly about my ‘ high centre ofgravity’, looking at my chest. It’s as if women are a bit unstable and have atendency to topple over – a design fault that should keep us smoothing out thebeach towels and chilling the beer.

In any case, once I had the board, I couldn’tback down. I usually happy in waves, but with a board in tow it was different.It felt like trying to swim with a 9ft coffee table tied to my ankle.

I spent most of the time flailing around inthe shallows like a beached whale. When I stumbled up the beach an hour or twolater, my children were waiting, « Mum, you’re rubbish, « I was told.

I’ve since suffered a series of accidents thatcould be used to illustrate a book called How Not to Surf. I would drag myselfback to the beach nursing injuries ranging from jellyfish stings to a fracturedcollarbone. Rule 1 : Never put your board between you and the wave. Iended up with my arm in a sling.

Rule 2 :Never grab the leash. Brokenfinger.

Then I met Johanna, a Swedish woman who hadalso just moved to Biarritz. In some ways we were similar, both independentwomen confused by the french obsession with lingerie. In other ways we weredifferent.She was a blonde freestyle stunt skier who looked like she had justwalked off the set of a Bond film. I was not.

Together we set up the Mamas surf club forwomen whose children were old enough to be left on the beach and were sick ofwatching the action from their loungers. We managed to collect together a groupof fortysomething yummy mummies from all over the world – Idaho, Lapland, Spainand England – who had found themselves in the area.

Our coach was Johanna’s boyfriend, localbig-wave hero Christophe. The first time Chrisophe pushed me into a wave Iclambered to my feet and stood for a couple of seconds. Then I was catapultedinto the water and swirled around like an insect in a hot tub. I tried torememeber all the advice i had been given. Don’t try to breathe underwater.Keep your hands over your face so you don’t break your nose. And, above all ,don’t panic.

When I finally stood up properly, the feelinglived up to all my expectations. It took me about six months to stop whoopingevery time I got a wave.

Going out with the Mamas was completelydifferent from trying to surf alone, or with men. There was somethingrevujenating about behaving like teenagers, taking a day off work to cruisealong looking for waves, stopping for a beer on the way home. Now Mamas surfclubs have formed up and down the french coastline, and we’ve been contacted bysome surfing mamas as far away as Australia. For anyone who wants to take upsurfing, I would recommend lessons. Boards can be expensive costing between 350and 1000 pounds.My tip is to start off with a second hand one,as you’re sure tocrash into a few rocks at first.

My children tell me I’ve changed.

« You were much more comfortable to siton before, » says my daughter, « But you seem much happier now you’resurfing. »

Who wouldn’t ? Now instead of swappingdessert recipes with French women I discuss tide tables with French men.

« Do you ever think about coming back toLondon ? » friends ask me.

It is true that there are more galleries therethan in Biarritz. It might be better for a single woman than a surf villagewith a disproportionate number of bikini models. But how could I ?Thereare no waves.

Book Review Plectrum

2011-07-22T12:21:00.000+01:00

Plectrum

Book Review: Surf Mama - Wilma Johnson

(Beautiful Books) £20.00

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

One could perhaps extrapolate that a defining formative moment for Wilma Johnson was the afternoon that she arrived late for a date with Joe Strummer, the legendary frontman of the equally legendary band, The Clash, to find he had already left and she never saw him again.

As she recounts in Surf Mama they had originally met in Camden Town, North London, whilst she was still a pupil at North London Collegiate School, when she chatted him up in a bar by asking, “‘Hello, are you Joe Strummer? Do you want to buy me a drink?’” To which, she writes, “‘I already have,’ he said with the coolest smile in the history of rock ‘n’ roll and handed me a can of Colt 45.” After which he would always put her on the guest list for gigs The Clash played, one of which coincided with her favourite day at school - the day she left! - when she hitchhiked to Aylesbury, a town to the north west of London, to see them.

Johnson had already begun her degree in Fine Art/Painting and Photography at St Martin’s School of Art in central London when Strummer took her out to lunch in nearby Soho and also bought her a present of some fabric from Berwick Street market. They arranged to meet the next day to go to an afternoon rockabilly gig, but she got stuck in a photography lecture and arrived late to find the gig had been cancelled and Strummer had left, and was heading off on tour soon after.

The what-might-have-been has stayed with her, and continued to irk her, and one could make the case that the lesson she learnt by staying in lessons that day and conforming to a timetable placed upon her, and by extension conforming to what external powers would consider the best choice for a girl at her age and stage, to put classes before “a date with my favourite rock star”, was a lesson hard learnt. Particularly brought to bear twenty plus years later when she had turned forty and was living the life of a self-professed “earth mother” with her husband, three young children, and ducks, on the west coast of Ireland. One day looking out to sea on the “westernmost beach in Europe” reflecting on her long held desire to be a surfer, she edged into the initially comforting thought that now being a woman, a mother, and over 40, no one would expect her ever to do so, and admitting to herself that no one had probably expected she would, or could, anyway.

But her comfort was immediately submerged, as she writes, “as if an icy wave has crashed over my head. What does this mean? That I will never learn to surf? That it’s too late? That I’m too old?” She resurfaced with the revelation that she did still want to become a surfer and a voice in her head repelling the dictates of convention with ever greater force: “‘NONONONONONO!’ the voice shouts. ‘I cannot be too old, I will become an extreme sports heroine if I choose to.’”

Though I am wary of underplaying the power of Strummer, and The Clash per se, challenging convention was in Johnson’s blood long before she met him. Her motorcycle riding grandmother was one of the first women dentists in the 1920s, and when she was growing up her economist, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, father would “wander around the house in a kimono at the weekends singing along to the soundtrack of The Jungle Book”, and took up windsurfing in his fifties. Equally, after Strummer’s departure from her life, Johnson turned away from punk to New Romanticism, of which her generation of St Martin’s students was the epicentre, and also, with Christine and Jennifer Binnie and Grayson Perry, in 1979 she founded the Neo-Naturist Cabaret, a ‘performance based live art practice’, whose idiosyncratic, body-painted, naturism took night clubs, galleries, festivals, public places, and even the stage of London’s Royal Opera House by storm.

All of which, to my mind at least, creates an eccentrically perfect set of ingredients for not only taking up surfing in one’s early-forties, but also becoming an accomplished surfer! Although the ingredients did not begin to really blend until a few years after her epiphanic moment on the Irish beach, by which stage she and her husband had split up and she was living with her children in a village near Biarritz, the Atlantic coast city in south western France, which has become internationally renowned for surfing since the late 1950s. In addition to her own determination not to be beaten, Johnson’s surf chefs de cuisinecame in the form of two friends she made in Biarritz, Johanna Matsson, a former professional free-skier, with whom she hatched a plan to form the Mamas Surf Club, a women-only surf club with the motto, ‘Out of the kitchen and into the surf’, and Matsson’s partner, Christophe Reinhardt, a former French surf champion, who became the Mamas’ instructor.

Now in her fifties Johnson is more than an accomplished surfer, she is a “surf addict”, her blood does more than stream, it crests with waves:
“I paddle down the face, then I stand up as the board becomes weightless and starts to accelerate. I can hear the white water breaking behind me and see the glassy blue curve stretching out in front of me. The spray blows into my face, flickering with prisms in the sunlight. In a moment I might be underwater swallowing seawater and small jellyfish, but right now I am an ancient princess of Hawaii, I am a bikini model, I am a goddess before the crest of a monster billow.”

Surf Mama is an exceptional memoir. Exceptional both in the story told and the storytelling. Exciting, funny, touching, revelatory, so completely does Johnson draw one in that one gets knocked for six when she wipes out, one dances for joy when she eventually hangs ten. Equally in all the exceptionality, in all Johnson’s brilliant upending of age and gender proscriptions and stereotyping, Surf Mama is a tale to which everyone can relate and take inspiration from. Because it is also a book about love and family, dreams and ambitions, and how one responds to, or more appropriately, rides the waves of, the changes that getting older brings to them all. Surf Mama is also a beautifully produced book, the publishers, Beautiful Books, very much living up to their name; the text is complemented and interspersed throughout with Johnsons’ wonderfully evocative paintings… writer, surfer, mother, she is also an internationally exhibited artist. Ultimately, Surf Mama is an highly inspiring, thoroughly enjoyable, and heartily recommended book.

Port Eliot

2011-07-14T12:54:00.000+01:00

Port Eliot Festival

Wilma Johnson

Artist Wilma Johnson was a neo-naturist performance artist in her twenties and an eathmother in an Irish fishing village in her thirties. By her forties, she found the sudden desire to become a surfer so she moved to Biarritz with her family where she swapped painting for a longboard. Here, she set up the Mamas Surf Club, a group of women who, like her, choose cold, wet neoprene suits over cocktail dresses. Her new book, Surf Mama, which is also illustrated with her art, tells the story of how she discovered life on a board.

As a grand entrance to this year’s festival, Wilma is going to paddle up the eustary on a surfboard and land on the river bank in a wetsuit to be greeted by her daughter Daisy Tallulah, who will be singing La Mer, by Charles Trenet, (written on a train in 1946 on SNCF toilet paper.)
With the addition of a bathrobe, she will read a short excerpt from Surf Mama, then answer questions.

As an extra treat, Wilma is planning to put on a miniature ‘exhibition’ of the paintings in the book, in the form of images on matchboxes, which will be given away at the end of the event before she leaves, again on the board to a reprise of La Mer.

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Surf Mama Saga

2011-07-01T13:56:00.000+01:00

Free Thinker

‘I’m a Surf Dude at Last ! »

In her mid life, Wilma Johnson saw somesurfers – and found her destiny.

Portrait Levon Biss

Most people’s idea of a surfer is a bronzedmale Californian teenager who says ‘dude ‘ alot. I don’t really fit the stereotype– I’m a woman in my fifites and an artist from London.

I’d moved to Biarritz with my children andhusband (we later divorced), and at first I was happy to watch the surf fromthe safety of a glamorous beach bar. Then, suddenly, I realised I really wantedto be out in the water. The idea that I might be too old was like an alarmgoing off in my head. If I was too old for this, what else was I too oldfo ?

I knew I had something to prove. I could seemy ambitions collapsing like dominoes and I no longer just wanted to learn tosurf, I needed to learn to surf. I swapped one of my paintings for a surfboardand headed out into the ocean, but I wasn’t a natural and for a while I thoughtthe only thing I’d prove was that it was indeed too late. But a friend wasinspired to set up the Mamas Surf Club for older women. If we failed, at leastwe’d fail together.

Thankfully, I did finally get to my feet – andonce I’d stood on the crest of a wave I was hooked. At first, whenever I saw abig set of waves coming I’d satrt paddlign away from them like a wind-up bathtoy. But today I think, « Oh, waht the hell, you’re only youngtwice, » and I go for it. When I come in past the tough Basque guys, theywhistle and cheer. Which is cool. I’m a gnarly surf dude at last.

Learning to surf has changed my life. It hasgiven me the confidence to do things that seemed impossible before, such ashaving my book published. Now, if I’m faced with a challenge, I think,« Is it really scarier than a two metre wave breaking over my head ?Can it really be harder than walking on water ? »