The Artist's Blog

Swell Girls

Meet the female forces of nature behind Laguna Beach’s historied surfing culture. 

By Shelby Stanger | Photos By Tom Servais

(This article is excerpted from Laguna Beach Magazine, September 2009.)

The saltwater near Thalia Street in Laguna Beach must have mystic properties. For in the neighborhood surrounding the small little reef you’ll find some of the most influential women in surfing’s history. Marge Calhoun, an Olympic-caliber swimmer and iconic surfer of the 1960s; Alisa Schwarzstein Cairns, champion surfer; Joyce Hoffman, noted as the best female competitor in the sport; artist Caroline Zimmermann, a surfer who puts her passion for the shore directly into her scenic beach oil paintings; and Taylor Pitz, a 16-year-old U.S.A. Surf Team member and high school surfing champion.

Here, discover some of the most influential women who contributed to Laguna’s— make that the world’s—surfing scene. Not only have they paved a path for the current and future generations of girls to participate in the mostly male-dominated sport, but they also have added grace and beauty to blue-green waters.

Excerpted from , September 2009

View the full archived Laguna Beach Magazine article pdf here.

“Just like in catching a wave, when I start a painting, I never know what I am going to get, and I love that anticipation.” —Caroline Zimmermann

While these Laguna Beach surfing sensations were busy making history, a 19 year-old artist from Anaheim, learning to surf in Laguna, found her true calling. Growing up inland, there was something about the sea that always beckoned. Caroline Zimmermann remembers saving each dime for countless rides to the beach. While attending California State University, Fullerton in 1984, Caroline took a ceramics class from a Laguna Beach Festival Artist Jon Stokesbary, who offered to teach her to surf. “It was the beginning of the rest of my life,” she says. Caroline will never forget the first time she set foot on the sand at the bottom of Thalia Street’s stairs in 1984. Not only was the water incredibly blue-green and the sand white and grainy, but, she says, “I just remember seeing all these guys— these fabulous-looking guys,” referring to surfers like the Denny Brothers, Steve Clark and Mark Price from Gotcha. For Caroline, surfing was a humbling experience, one that translated well into her art. She sees the ocean as a place of great energy, where waves are given to you, not taken. Caroline’s surfing and painting have always complemented each other well. “Just like in catching a wave, when I start a painting, I never know what I am going to get, and I love that anticipation,” she says. Later marrying a surfing editor, Caroline traveled and surfed all over the world, getting to paint scenes in the Caribbean, Indonesia and Hawaii. She has hundreds of mostly oil paintings with perfect breaking waves, palm trees swaying in the afternoon light, Hawaiian plumerias, a lone surfer about to paddle out and old Crystal Cove before the cottages were torn down. In the mid-1980s, Caroline would surf all day and then show her artwork at the Festival of Arts at night. It took her a few times to jury in and be accepted, but it became an annual ritual. “To go surfing with your buddies and then work at the festival at night was just an amazing lifestyle,” she says. Today, she lives five months of the year in Tuscany, Italy, with her filmmaker husband John Charles Jopson; the other seven she spends in Laguna Beach. She still shows her artwork at the Gallery McCollum in the north part of town and at the Festival of Arts in the canyon during the summers. “I feel so honored to have carried on the legacy of painting Laguna along with the hundreds of artists who live and paint here,” she says.

Marge Calhoun, Alisa Schwarzstein Cairns, Joyce Hoffman, Caroline Zimmermann, Taylor Pitz

Excerpted from Laguna Beach Magazine, September 2009

View the full archived article pdf here.

View more of Caroline's Laguna Beach surfing pics: