Tony Caramanico is a Montauk based surfer / artist who has been surfing since the ‘60s. In that time, he has compiled an astounding number of journal entries that have become works of art that are exhibited in galleries and sold as prints.
Surfing is often a combination of ecstasy and terror enjoyed in far-flung locations under very special conditions. Surfers are a brand of those lunatics you see on tv who risk sure death and dismemberment to get close to tornadoes, the difference being, surfers want to "Ride it!" And the ride is similar to jumping off a ship’s mast in a gale and landing on Moby Dick for a few seconds of oneness with the elements of water, wind, and sheer fiery adrenalin. It’s a fact that aging surfers secretly read Melville and weep through the whole thing. Tony Caramanico went surfing one day in the ‘60s and never came back. Fortunately, we have the journal he kept every day in every crazy place in the world where waves line up and break. It’s a personal history of who came for lunch, where the party is, the surf, thte shopping list, the friends and girlfriends, and it’s also a history of the world as it filtered back to the beach; the hostages, the Challenger explosion, echoes of a fire 8,000 miles away. A few years ago, he began blowing up and digitally printing, framing, and selling pages from his journals, each a colorful, capsulated day. The Surf Journals are an exuberant trip to places where ecstasy is possible, if you’re patient and crazy enough, and where the terrors of the world are muted into the background, replaced by a more immediate and personal odyssey. As for the Golden Fleece ? We think Caramanico has found it.
-Warren Padula, 2008