Makorori goes mysterioso

SURF'S UP: Makorori longboard classic T-shirt graphic by Daryn Mcbride.

The psychedelia of posters popular in the 1960s is invoked in the imagery for this summer’s Makorori First Light Longboard Surfing Classic T-shirt.

Designed by Tauranga surfer Daryn Mcbride, the artist-graphic designer-photographer has reprised the rear-facing, nose-riding surf pose of his design of last year, but he has brought a different style to this season’s graphic.

Instead of the clean lines with pointillist (where small dots of colour are applied in patterns to form an image) of the 2017 design, Mcbride’s surfer in the 2018 model spreads his arms as he faces a pulsating wave wall and bubbled sky that could be part mind.

At the heart of a puffy sun and cartoon bible-beams is the numeral 2018 while the sky is made up of cloud-writing that reads “Makorori first light longboard".

“Surfing”, reads the stretched curl of white water. “Classic”, reads the sliding wave-face.

The half-submerged bottom of the wave mashes language with a stylised pattern. The ‘borne’ part of Gisborne is intact but the first few letters are still shaping up. An alternative slant of mind is required to see them.

A crusty rock grins out of the swirly shallows.

“Mysterioso”, as 1960s Californian surfers say of the sea in journalist Tom Wolfe’s story The Pump House Gang published in 1968.

During a chat about the 2018 T-shirt graphic, Mcbride, and the longboard event’s organiser David Timbs, agreed on a psychedelic rock poster-style.

“With the hipster movement, he said these young guys were reminding him of the 1960s,” says Mcbride.

“Lettering makes up the pattern in the T-shirt design. That was drawn from a psychedelic poster. They often combined text with imagery. That is my favourite era, my greatest inspiration.”

Mcbride tried about 10 colour arrangements, whittled them down to four and couldn’t decide. From an orange and gold combination to neon pink, yellow and blue, each one was totally different, he says.

“I loved all of them. I couldn’t decide.”

One version was in five shades of green.

“I threw in some sandy colour and that was it,” he says.

As maker of the surfing classic’s top prize of a longboard, part of Mcbride’s brief was to produce artwork for it as well. He created the initial artwork for the board with oil pastel in a large-scale work. The style and colour use is very different from that of his T-shirt designs but this is the style he is known for, he says.

Capturing the sense of walking to a wave breakHis longboard-deck design offers a glimpse through a thicket of purple-stemmed flax plants, and the dark, vinous trunk of a pohutukawa and its red flowers, of a sunlit, tubular wave.

He wanted to capture that sense of walking to a wave break but only being able to catch glimpses of it through the bush.

“You can see waves but not the whole thing. I wanted people to look at it and drift off into a dreamy place.”

The oil pastel work original was photographed, printed onto fabric through a process called sublimation, then laminated between two layers of fibreglass.

T-shirts for the event will be available in two weeks’ time.

The Makorori First Light Longboard Surfing Classic will be held at Makorori Beach at 7am on February 4.