Litmus creator Andrew Kidman and his supernatural brush with global phenomenon Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift would have been nine when I first began drawing this surfboard decal in 1998.
Swift was the name of a sailing boat that my father’s best friend Stewart Morris won an Olympic Gold Medal sailing in the Swallow Class in 1948. There was a black and white photo of Stewart sailing it hanging on the wall of my home growing up. It looked fast.
I don’t know why I drew the girl’s face as the graphic. I worked on it for a couple of years, different versions, trying get a late 60s – early 70s feel into the graphic. I was attempting to reflect the era of surfboard that I liked to ride in the artwork. I was going after that feeling of the rock poster art Bill Graham and Chet Helms commissioned to promote their music shows around San Francisco in the 70s.
I felt I’d got it close, so I showed it to my girlfriend, Mish, who looked at it and said, “The eyes and mouth need fixing.”
Trusting Mish, I let her fix the eyes and mouth. It was like watching her put on eyeliner and fix her lippy.
So, I had the laminates printed in Brookvale, and over the years I’ve used them on some of the surfboards I have shaped. The past couple of years, since the Taylor Swift phenom, and the global surfboard glut, custom surfboard orders have been pretty lean.
Currently there’s no order cards to fill. The shaping bay is just a storage room of stale foam off cuts, yellowed foam dust and tools scattered around the floor. Occasionally I open the door and look in there and think about shaping, there’s a blank in the corner with an outline on it of something I was thinking about, but I don’t have the coin to glass it.
So that’s all it is, an outline and I think, “Maybe that would work?” and I close the door.
The other day I was moving shit around, looking for something in the shed when I saw the Swift laminate on the deck of one of my boards. Taylor Swift is omnipresent in all our lives now. I’d never thought about it before, the girl in the decal was looking back at me, I started laughing.
Mish walked in, and I said to her,
“Look at this, it kind of looks like Taylor Swift.”
Mish started laughing, “It kind of does.”
“That’s weird right?” I said.
“Yeah that is weird,” Mish replied, “You probably wouldn’t draw that today.”
“I dunno, I kind of like her, Taylor Swift might be able to save the world.”
Mish laughed. I went on, “She might even be able to save the Swift Parrot’s habitat in Tasmania.”
“Fat chance,” Mish said as she walked out the door, unconvinced.
Hey Taylor, could you bring the plight of the Swift Parrot to the attention of the nation? All you need to do is talk about it, your audience is attentive.
(Editor’s note: Andrew Kidman is the creator of game-changing surf film Litmus (1996), its 2019 sequel Beyond Litmus and the surfboard design documentary On the Edge of a Dream where an impossible to ride board was filmed ruining the live of myriad surfers. His newspaper magazine Acetone, made with PHD student Sam Rhodes, acted, briefly, as a cultural bulwark to the great WSL/VAL replacement.)
