Quick Take
A new film by documentarian Josh Pomer looks back fondly on the life and passions of the late surfer/artist Shawn "Barney" Barron, one of Santa Cruz's most enduring characters. "Particle Fever" screens Thursday at the Rio Theatre.
The Santa Cruz surfing scene has been around long enough to have a few legendary figures, surfers of extraordinary skill or courage or moxie — or all three — who, in many cases, died too young.
Even in that pantheon, however, Shawn “Barney” Barron was a uniquely unforgettable character. Barron, who died in 2015 at the age of 44 of a heart attack, certainly staked his claim as an innovator in the water — he was famous for his talent at aerial surfing and later jumped into big-wave surfing by taking on Mavericks. That would have been enough to earn him a spot in surfing lore. But he was more than that. Known for his colorful, often superhero-themed wetsuits, Barron was also an accomplished artist, part class clown, part adrenaline junkie, part reckless adventurer.
The bright streak Barron painted across the Santa Cruz surfing community is there for all to see in “Particle Fever,” a new documentary from filmmaker Josh Pomer. The film premieres on Thursday at the Rio Theatre.
Pomer is the filmmaker behind the quintessential Santa Cruz surf documentary “The Westsiders” (2010), which profiled the wild times and hard life of a trio of Westside Santa Cruz surf icons. One of the three main characters in the film was Barney Barron.
Pomer now lives in Santa Barbara, but he grew up on Santa Cruz’s Westside as a friend and admirer of Barron. Pomer was a kid at Mission Hill Middle School when he first met Barron, who was a couple of years older. Pomer admired Barron for his surfing skills, but as he got to know him, that admiration grew into something like love.
“His mind, it was always just working on a different level,” said Pomer. “He just really stuck out.”
For years, since he was a teenager, Pomer followed Barron around with a camera, and much of the new film is mined from that store of footage. “My first thought was to make a kind of experimental film about Barney,” Pomer said. “You know, like make it eight hours long, just hanging out with Barney, sort of inspired by those Andy Warhol movies where he just filmed people for six hours straight. [Barron] would have loved that.”
Instead, the film is about 50 minutes long, and works as a kind of endearing introduction from a friend to an audience who might not have ever known him. “There’s still a lot of just hanging out with Barney. It’s not a straight biography,” Pomer said. “A lot of it is just a chance to soak in what he was like.”
Out of the water, Barron pursued visual arts with an equal passion for self-expression. For years, he dedicated himself to creating paintings, sculptures, collages and other art pieces, inspired in large measure by his high school art teacher, Katie Harper, at Santa Cruz High. His themes were all over the map, from animals to nudes to the ocean to the cosmos. He did Dali-esque psychedelic portraiture and trippy abstracts.
“You go to his house,” said Pomer, “and there wasn’t an unpainted surface anywhere. He’d have a chair, and he’d be all, ‘What can I do with this chair?'”
He once co-curated a show at the R. Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz based on the oceans. And, after his death, the same gallery hosted a big retrospective of his work titled “The HeArt of Barney.”
As a surfer, Barron was just as creative on the waves, earning a reputation as an inventive free-surfer and big personality. He was something of an eccentric among Santa Cruz’s big-name surfers. While most surfers opted for the standard black wetsuit, for instance, Barron would often take to the waves in a brightly colored one, often in superhero themes.
“Oh, yeah,” said Pomer, “Spider-Man, Aquaman. He did a [“Star Wars”] storm trooper. He actually helped launch Buell wetsuits.”
Barron surfed at many breaks in the area, but Steamer Lane on the Westside was, said Pomer, his “bread and butter.” His acrobatic moves and his colorful suits made him a favorite of surfing enthusiasts who gathered at the lighthouse to watch him do his stuff.
Barron’s life, however, was not all sunshine and blue skies. According to Pomer, he suffered from bipolar disorder, and he was familiar with drug use (a small amount of methamphetamine was found in his system when he died).
Pomer said that he made the decision to focus in his film more on Barron’s love for surfing and his larger-than-life personality than on his drug use. “I’ve probably spent more time with Barney than just about anyone I’ve ever known,” he said, “and I can tell you, he never did drugs in front of me. I know that he did do drugs sometimes, but this isn’t a cautionary-tale kind of movie. It’s more about celebrating the positive aspects of Barney and being more open about his mental condition.”
When Barron died unexpectedly on Cinco de Mayo in 2015, Pomer was heartbroken at the news. But on reflection, he said, “He was such a special guy in a weird way that I wasn’t that surprised [at the news of his death]. I mean, there are some people in your life who are so awesome, you just think, ‘Will this person ever get old?’ To me, Barney was just so magical, that every time you’d see him, you were just transported to a different world. For me, it feels like something that maybe I haven’t dealt with completely. It’s almost like he’s still around, that he’s away on a surf trip or whatever, that he’s pulling a trick on us all, that a year from now, he’s going to have another art show, and we’re all going to be like, ‘Where have you been?’”
“Particle Fever: The Extraordinary Life of Barney Barron” will be screened Thursday, Oct. 24, at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. with music and prizes. The film starts at 7:30 p.m.