Lassen’s Hawaiian connection is legitimate and of long standing. Born in 1956, he moved with his family to Maui at age 11. He began surfing while a junior high school student; by age 20 he’d earned his pro designation. Lassen also learned to paint in Lahaina, the seaport village at the foot of the West Maui Mountains. Taught only by his mother Carol and the public schools, he graduated from painting designs on t-shirts to crafting full-blown canvases. As he mastered both the painter’s craft and a surfer’s skills, Lassen’s daily views of the Lahaina Harbor, the boats, the sea, the sky, and the Hawaiian sea life all made a powerful – and lifelong -- impression on him.Like every vital artist, Lassen constantly finds new forms of expression for his creative energies. Painting series, for example. Just as musicians may group songs with a similar theme together to create a unified “concept album,” Lassen enjoys producing a series of paintings that evoke a single theme or tell a continuing story. For example, his “Beyond Hana’s Gate” paintings are a line of idealized Hawaiian oceanfront scenes that portray a boy-girl love story in terms of landscape and seascape. Some of these paintings contain “clues” to the plot of the ongoing fictional saga they depict – about “a beautiful Island girl” who pines for “her handsome foreign lover, who has gone to sea.” It’s a charming conceit, and also a clever marketing strategy that virtually ensures collectability.