Dan McCarthy prefaces his collection of paintings and found photos by recalling the innovation and resourcefulness that went into making his own skateboards as a kid in the late ‘60s. “These homemade boards would get ridden up and down our residential streets, and sidewalks, along the walk ways and parking lots of shopping centers, around playgrounds after school and when lucky, downtown near the Huntington Beach Pier.”

McCarthy’s Skateboarders is a series of dynamic and euphoric characters whose expressive nude bodies, rendered in opaque candy-colored acrylic against a minimalist silk screened canvas, ecstatically leap and twist off their boards. The addition of found photographs from the early ‘70s serve to illustrate the nostalgic freedom kids like McCarthy found in surfing the cement of Southern California during skateboarding’s golden age.