Here's Windy Osborn speaking, with a great intro by racing legend Cheri Elliot, after being inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame in 2012. You can check out (and buy) Windy's classic, fine art, freestyle and other prints at windyosborn.com .
On on Thursday evening, the last day of July 1986, I flew from San Jose, California to LAX airport in Los Angeles with my bike, a Skyway T/A, a suitcase, and $80 in my wallet. I got picked up there by Andy Jenkins, Mark "Lew" Lewman, and Craig "Gork" Barrette. Officially, I started work the next day, Friday August 1st. I was starting the job that changed the entire course of my life, working at Wizard Publications. Wizard was the long time publisher of BMX Action magazine, and for two years then, the first BMX freestyle magazine, FREESTYLIN'. Somehow my zine, San Jose Stylin', got me the job there. That still amazes me. I was 20 years old, and so nervous that I actually got the hives a couple days before leaving the Bay Area. I wore long sleeve shirts to work for two weeks to hide the hives, and the guys made fun of me for that a little.
Although my start date was Friday, Gork drove us all in his van straight back the the office from LAX. As luck would have it, that Saturday was the ten year anniversary party for BMX Action. At the small warehouse building that housed Wizard, I followed Gork up onto the big industrial shelving racks in the back. Our job for the night was to go through a bike box full of little yellow boxes, each close to the size of a cigarette pack. Those boxes held color slides of photos shot by Bob "Oz" Osborn, his daughter Windy, and probably a few other contributors over the ten years. Gork and I were to find 100 of the best photos for a slide show ot play at the party. At his core, Oz was a photographer, and Windy grew up going to BMX races with Oz and her BMX racing brother, R.L.. She picked up a camera, following in her father's footsteps, and Windy began as a girl with a camera in a boy's sport, and worked her way up to legendary photographer in the BMX and freestyle worlds.
When I started at Wizard, Windy was the staff photographer for both magazines. Oz had moved on to spending most of his time out in the wild somewhere shooting fine art photos. As Andy Jenkins explained it to me then, "Oz is here (at the office) about one week a month, and the rest of the time he's out in his van taking Ansel Adam-type pictures of trees and flowers." The van was a highly decked out 4WD van, made for getting to out of the way places and camping for days while shooting nature photos.
Officially, my job was "editorial assistant" for both magazines, meaning Andy, Lew, and Gork could all boss me around. They were all cool, by and large, though we had our different views on things. In reality, my main job was to proofread both magazines, and fix every single little spelling and grammatical mistake. At 20 years old, armed only with my Boise High School diploma, I was taking over for Don-Boy, a guy with an English degree. Hey, no pressure. Andy, Lew, and Gork waited until a couple of days before deadline to start writing most of their articles, and so I ended up proofreading every single word of both magazines over about four days, right before, and after, deadline.
The rest of the month, driving Windy to photo shoots was one of my consistent jobs. Sure, Windy could driver herself, obviously. But having me deal with getting directions, keeping the Astro van gassed up, picking up film, (remember film?) and around to help out when needed on shoots, allowed Windy to focus more on her job, taking great photos. While Andy, Gork, and Lew were officially my bosses, Windy was more like a veteran co-worker. Once we had photo shoots scheduled, she expected me to handle the logistics, to get her to the right place to shoot the right rider or skater, and she was ready to find the best angles and backdrops to snap killer shots. Working with Windy was the biggest thing I was looking forward to when I found out I got the job in July of '86.
But working with Windy wasn't like working with just some random person at another job. First of all, Windy was hot (and still is, of course). Second, she was a handful of years older than me, and I was a 20-year-old, deathly shy guy, still a virgin, and completely inept at talking to women, let alone hot women. I always kind of felt like a high school freshman who somehow got the job of driving the head cheerleader around, and I never knew what to say. Since I was always afraid of saying or doing something stupid around Windy, I did exactly that on a pretty frequent basis. So for a while, it seemed the only thing I was good at was pissing Windy off. On more than one occasion, I took a wrong freeway ramp, which instantly costs you 15-20 minutes in Southern California traffic. It's a huge and confusing area, I was new to it, and wasting time driving really bugged Windy. She traveled most weekends for work, and, unlike me, actually had a social life. She took as long as necessary to shoot photos, but didn't like wasting time traveling to and from shoots. She wanted to get back to the office and then head home at a reasonable time. In addition, I'd forget something once in a while, or made some little mistake that bugged her. I also learned, the hard way, of course, that riders who don't have cars tend to give really shitty directions to places. Following those directions often wasted more time. But in time, I got my shit together more, and things went smoother.
I landed at Wizard fresh from 11 months working at a Pizza Hut. It was typical restaurant work, if you do the job well, you're busy every minute, and there is no down time. There's a list of things to get done to clean and close, as well as lots of pizzas that had to be made. I was the shift supervisor, and in charge of closing every night, with a couple workers to boss around. The summer before that, I managed the Boise Fun Spot, a tiny amusement park (carnie street cred!) where I had 12 employees under me, and had to make sure everything got done day to day. I was used to being in charge, having a bunch of responsibility, and a ton of things to do, and planning and organizing things. I'd been doing low level management at pretty traditional jobs. I was used to cracking the whip on other people, being in charge, not doing much creatively, and feeling that if I wasn't constantly busy, I wasn't earning my money.
Then came Wizard. It was a highly successful family business, all about creativity and making an amazing, visually stimulating product, I was the new guy,and not the boss of anything. Even Cosmo, the Factory Watch Cat, could boss me around, but he was chill and never did. There was a lot of down time. As cool as it was, I struggled with not being busy all the time.
Looking back from 33 years later, and lots of personal and creative growth since, I realize that I was both a Blocked Artist, and a Shadow Artist. Both of those terms I learned of in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, which I highly recommend for anyone creative. A Blocked Artist is someone who has a strong creative drive, but also has deep seeded beliefs that it's bad or arrogant to do art. Blocked artists routinely put down other artists, and sabotage their own creative work. There's a continuous inner struggle between the part of them that wants to do creative work, and the part that honestly believes it's bad or wrong to be creative. Those negative beliefs are usually instilled in them as children, and sometimes by religious beliefs, or both.
A Shadow Artist is a highly creative person, often blocked as well, who somehow works themselves into proximity of other "officially" creative people. A Shadow artist might paint cool pictures, but downplay their creativity, and talk up their older brother, a talented musician, the family member everybody knows is highly creative. Hiding in the shadows of another artist lets you off the hook for not really producing what you're capable of. The TV and film production world is filled with Shadow Artists working around the famous actors, directors, and writers, but with dreams of their own. When I worked in the box office of Cirque du Soleil, there were a lot of Shadow Artists there, as well.
So I was a young guy, incredibly afraid of actually using my own creativity, suddenly driving Windy Osborn to photo shoots. She was a professional, seasoned, published monthly, veteran photographer by then.
Looking back from today's knowledge, the biggest thing I really learned from Windy was that it's actually OK, and possible, to be a professional creative person.
I grew up as a kid in rural and small town Ohio, very conservative in the old school, and non-political, sense of that word. People did things they way they'd always been done, and change happened very slowly. The adults in my childhood mostly worked factory jobs they didn't really like. People didn't have "passions," they had hobbies done in their spare time. It was simply known that it was impossible to make a living as an artist, of any kind, so it didn't even need to be said. "Artists" were those weird, crazy, lazy (and usually gay, it was believed) people in New York City and L.A. No one wanted their kid to ever be one. It was simply something that was not done. Period. Coming from there, I didn't take "art" seriously, and that's something I struggled with for years, and still struggle with, even after 35 years of doing many kinds of creative work. (Here's my "creative resume'.")
While I also worked with Andy, Lew, and Gork, we all did most of our creative work alone, in our offices. Windy was the first real working artist I ever worked with, and got to watch in action. Once we got to a photo shoot, I mostly just hung out and watched. What I was watching, I realize now, was a real, functional, professional artist, for the first time. The creative process is something completely different than the list of things to clean that I had in my head as Pizza Hut employee, or the timed world of running carnival rides.
Creative work is largely fun, often playful. It doesn't seem like work, which really makes a Blocked Artist feel guilty. You try different things. Some work, some don't. Ideas pop up out of nowhere, and you give them a shot. You're not on a time clock. You take the time necessary to get a good angle, work with the lighting available, and find cool backdrops to make the photo look even better, when possible. Andy, Gork, Lew, and I used to joke that we knew every weird colored wall within ten miles of the Wizard offices. "Got a photo shoot with Martin Aparijo in his yellow GT uniform?" There's that blue tile wall over on (whatever)street." That'll make the yellow really pop. That was a normal thing.
Windy was always in charge, she knew the technical aspects of photography, and she had her vision and ideas for each shoot, and the riders, and me, collaborated with her to make it happen. That was a huge difference from my mindset, and while it was fun, it wasn't really "work" in my mind, and I was always struggling with the idea that I really wasn't "doing things right," because of my inner battle with doing art and creative work. So I was about as uptight as could be back then, which is probably the main reason I didn't last long working there. Well, that and I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. Plus let's face it, Spike Jonze wound up permanently replacing me, and Spike meeting up and working with Andy, Lew, Gork, and Windy was destined to be. I'm pretty sure the Universe had that planned eons ago.
While I never did learn to actually work a light meter (I didn't need to with my Pentax ME Super), my photography definitely improved by working with Windy. For the year after leaving Wizard, I was the writer and photographer for the AFA Newsletter. My shots never equaled Windy's (though my panning Vander GPV shot was in the ball park), I went on to do my own photo shoots, and lots and lots of good video shoots, in the next several years. From Windy Osborn, I learned what a working artist, a photographer in her case, looks like, and how they go about things, and how they collaborate, and strive to create something great. So thanks a lot for that Windy.
While Windy grew up in a creative family, in highly creative Southern California, and in a new and growing and evolving sport, BMX racing and freestyle, I came from a part of the country that bought art, but hated the people who made it. I always found that amazing. Most small town people go to church on Sunday to worship God, The Creator. But those same people hate highly creative people. That's one of those weird paradoxes of religion. The struggle to undo those early years of prejudice against artists has led to many years of finding and working with my own creative process. Working with Windy back in 1986, and having to write for real magazines, I now realize, was a big part of getting that process started.
My memories of those shoots I went on with Windy are spotty. I remember little pieces. Windy on her stomach to shoot Don Brown's shove-it, on the Huntington Beach Pier. Joking around with Ron Wilkerson and Windy on the short drive to shoot the original abubaca sequence. Watching Windy shoot a few angles of a cool looking lawnmower variation Frank Garrido did, on a side street, in front of this gnarly, industrial looking building. Taking Martin Aparijo to "the gray wall" for a Miami hop-hops shoot, only to find the shadow was perfect on the wall, shading the wall but not the sidewalk. Windy was super excited about that shadow, which I didn't think was too big of a deal at the time. Now it makes more sense, it was a bit of synchronicity. Then, on the concrete area next to The Spot at the Redondo Beach Pier, she shot Rodney Mullen, and I did a mini-interview of him (December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'), and I talked both of them into shooting a sequence of Rodney's one footed rocket ollie trick. Neither of them thought it was worth shooting, but I had the feeling that day. The sequence made the magazine.
Then there's the time we did a shoot with Chris Day, just before dusk, on a big, slippery, concrete circle thing in Huntington Beach. I was goofing around on the Wizard shop scooter, doing power slides, while Windy snapped pics of Chris. After the shots of him, Windy said, "Hey, let me see that again," talking about my slides. It was a scooter, but it was also the only time I got to ride something in front of Windy's lens. She got this great shot of me doing a one footed, sideways power slide, back foot off the ground, totally leaned into it, with the back peg on the scooter scraping on the ground. That shot almost made it into FREESTYLIN', in an 80's scooter article. I was stoked, even though it was on a scooter. Then Andy J. called me into his office. "Steve, that shot of you on the scooter makes scooters look cool... and we just can't have that." Andy, Lew, and I laughed. But I was bummed. I really wanted a shot of me riding... something... in FREESTYLIN'. It didn't happen. But I did manage to get to do one little spontaneous photo shoot with Windy, and that's a great notch on the BMX life belt.
Everyone who has a creative drive, also has a long journey in front of them, to discover their own creative process, and what mediums work best for them. There are a lot of ups and downs on that journey, but those ups and downs are where the art comes from. So follow your intuition, find your own path, and keep creating and keep learning.
Here's another great photo by Windy, from the era when I worked there. Who else could make a lawnmower look this fucking cool. Windy snap of Ceppie Maes. Again, you can check out and buy her prints at windyosborn.com.
Wow, I made it through a big, long post without mentioning Windy's boobs... which happened to be the title of the first blog post of mine that went viral in the Old School BMX world, way back in 2008. It was a good little story, but I hadn't learned the limits of what you can and cannot write about, concerning other people's lives. Sorry about that one Windy. But I've managed to write close to 1,000 other BMX stories in the last ten years, that didn't piss Windy off, like the "boobs" post did. So that's good.
Check out my new mash-up "book/blog thing" about the future:
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Where was that picture of Ceppie shot? Was it in the Fountain Valley area? If so, I was farmiliar, in high school, with the gang who may have graffiti’d that wall.
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