The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
It’s stifling in Brighton Beach, New South Wales, and Paul McNeil is delegating tasks. Dressed in shorts, a t-shirt, and red Adidas slides, he’s passing out cans of spray paint and masks, conferring with Australian surfers/artists Ozzie Wright and Brodie Jackson on appropriate concepts and colors. Though his choice of dress appears less than official, “The Mayor,” as I’ve heard him referred to no less than a dozen times in my two weeks in and around Byron Bay, is holding court.
I’ve met McNeil and his colleagues here in Brighton at a well-appointed, raised, beach-cottage vacation rental that, for the moment, boasts an unadulterated milky-white exterior. McNeil’s been tasked with changing that. Contracted to add some exterior murals and some interior accents, he and his colleagues decamp to opposing sides of the house. As instructed, Wright and Jackson spend the next hour or so illustrating cartoonish orange and red suns, and bold Keith Haring-esque red and yellow pictograms, respectively.
McNeil, meanwhile, fastidiously adds imagery from his current arsenal of caustic leitmotifs (dejected palm trees and large, toothless waves) to doors and walls around the property. Within two hours, the bungalow is awash in the surf-inspired, folk-art imagery of three of Byron Bay’s most radical artists.
The fact that McNeil convinced Jackson and Wright to join him for no compensation (save the remaining cans of spray paint) is illustrative of the status the 56-year-old, New Zealand-born artist has earned among the insular and eclectic Byron surf community. Further, it speaks to the impact he’s had on the region, and its counterculture surf inhabitants, since he moved here from Sydney roughly a decade and a half ago.
“I was kind of in a rut for a bit, and I thought maybe I’d go to a little country town,” McNeil says of moving to Byron. “People said I’d go crazy here. And I probably have.”
I join him again a few days later in his capacious, second story residence in the hills just outside Byron. He’s recently moved to this sprawling farm, where he keeps an art studio on the bottom floor of a corrugated steel warehouse. “I live up here, paint, and drive down to the beach to surf,” he says. “It’s a wonderful setup.”
These hills are also where McNeil’s lifelong infatuations with music and art have collided. He recently helped to revitalize the famed Music Farm Studios, which is a stone’s throw from where we’re currently sitting and chatting. He hopes to return Music Farm, an institution where decades ago massive Australian acts like Midnight Oil laid down hit records, to prominence.
It seems like a perfect time for the Music Farm’s resurrection in Byron, a town that has transformed during McNeil’s 14 years here. The area has long been a veritable living surf-history museum. And though it’s still a rural, bohemian outpost, it’s now home to a hip and thriving arts community as well. To that end, McNeil’s former ventures, the Sea Cell surf shop and The Art Park Gallery, played outsized roles in cultivating an appreciation for alternative surf culture, as well as both high and lowbrow art, among Byron’s roughly 9,000 residents.
“It’s a big thing for me as an older man—just to try and start something, or trigger something,” McNeil says of his motivation to make an impact in Byron. “I knew it was a very cool town. But when I moved here, they were still listening to blues and folk music, and all the artists here were painting dolphins and rainbows. The youth were all bored. I thought if they were exposed to something cool, maybe they’d just go home and do it themselves.”
McNeil’s deep baritone and thick Kiwi accent add weight to his words. He speaks thoughtfully, mixing simple or esoteric language with astute references. He’s adept at identifying irony in most situations. The earnest sense of purpose he’s expressed in regards to a higher motivation seems in conflict with the flippant sense of humor and sardonic nature of his artwork—a decades-spanning portfolio supplemented through stints as a graphic designer, surfboard artist, creative director, gallery curator, and most notably, a 20-year-plus relationship with the iconic, often absurdist, always unimpeachably cool Australian surf brand Mambo.
In the 90s, alongside masterful Australian artists like Reg Mombassa and Richard Allan, McNeil earned acclaim for his cheeky, overelaborate pieces, such as the promotional poster he made for Mambo’s line of Hawaiian shirts called “Loud Shirts.” The design featured a bald, cherubic, Caucasian surfer dressed in a grass skirt, his speech bubble announcing “*@#!! Off!” McNeil says his time at Mambo served as his informal art education, as he reveled in the flippancy with which his fellow artists approached their work.
“At Mambo I learned that humor goes with everything,” he says. “It’s easier to be heard through humor,
or a sharp quip, than something really complicated.”
And though he may have pared down his toolkit and simplified his techniques over the nearly four decades he’s spent as a working artist, McNeil’s approach has remained consistent. “My art joke is: If it takes an hour, that’s half an hour too long,” he says.
His pieces of late are as minimal as they’ve ever been. Devised with a pop art color palette, each is typically reduced to a simple image created with a couple of passes of a spray can or a few brush strokes, and punctuated by a clever turn of phrase or a one-word witticism. A black dot in the middle of a white canvass with the word “Universe,” or two interwoven black circles with the word “Infinity,” are two examples from recent installations.
“I taught myself to stop improving my skills,” McNeil says of his progression. “I use a computer everyday and I’m fairly good on it, but I just started moving away from the norm—grids and technology. The more slick graphics I saw, the more I wanted to go the other way. It’s better to go with whatever is under your nose and just put it down on paper.”
“The thing that stands out to me about Paul’s work is that he is very free, and his wit and humor seem to come across really well,” says artist and filmmaker Thomas Campbell, who first met McNeil when the Californian was invited to be the artist in residency at McNeil’s Byron gallery, The Art Park. “Things with a simple context, and simple design quality that have an impact, are actually really hard to do. Being able to do things off-the-cuff, loosely, is a real talent. It takes a lot of self-confidence.”
McNeil’s treatment of surfing’s more philistine nature is similarly irreverent. Recent installations, held in conjunction with alternative surf events, featured many pieces meant to take the piss out of our precious pastime.
“We sit around and talk about being one with nature and spiritual connections and all that,” he says. “But [surfing]’s none of that. It’s finding a place to park, and trying not to get smashed on the rocks, and pretending you’re fit enough to paddle, then jostling in the lineup and waiting an hour for a wave. I like seeing all those contradictions. We think of surfers as laidback yogis, but they aren’t really making tea in the back of their kombis. They’re driving through McDonalds in their four-wheel-drive trucks.”
McNeil’s plain-spoken, skeptic’s sense of humor can be traced to his roots growing up on the South Island of New Zealand in Christchurch—a place he says was “very drab, gray” and “very English” during his childhood. “I think New Zealanders were a bit like the Irish in those days, with black humor,” he says. “If someone was like, ‘I want to make a film and win an Oscar,’ a New Zealander would be like, ‘What would you wanna do that for? Where’s that going to get you?’ Very sarcastic. Very cold. But funny.”
Though McNeil showed proficiency in drawing as an adolescent—even winning a Hot Rod drawing contest at age 7—he was encouraged to turn his inherent skill into a practical occupation. “They’d go, ‘You should be a sign writer,’ because those are the people with paint brushes in their hands. It’s the idea of putting art to practical use. It’s quite hilarious when you think about it.”
Though he had no formal training, McNeil got a job as a screen printer right out of high school, laying out advertisements for supermarkets and other small businesses in Christchurch. “Looking back on my life’s work, those layouts kind of find their way through all of it. Just bad, cheap, crudely-done style. Which I still like,” he says.
As a teenager, McNeil devoured American and Australian surf and skate magazines. He was infatuated with the works of alternative artists like Rick Griffin, Ed Roth, and Keith Haring. It was that exposure to American counterculture movements of the late 70s and early 80s—like surfing, but especially punk rock and American street art—that offered McNeil a window to another way of life beyond the borders of Christchurch.
“Punk rock came along and changed everything,” he says of influential New Zealand scenes like the one at Flying Nun Records, and of bands like The Clean and Sneaky Feelings, who became the soundtrack of New Zealand’s disenchanted youth. “All of a sudden, the music was actually all around me. I could see it, hear it. I knew where it was coming from. At the same time, we were very aware that no one is going to get famous playing music in New Zealand,” he continues. “No one is getting a record deal. There was a real starvation of ambition. No ability to get anywhere.”
McNeil left New Zealand in the early 80s and eventually landed in Sydney, with the intention of getting his foot in the door at Mambo, whose ads he’d encountered in surf and skate magazines. “They actually blew my mind,” he says of the non-conformist, Aussie surf label. “They were so cutting edge, so far out, so sophisticated. I said, ‘I have to work there.’ I rang them five times before I got ahold of someone. They had a big screen printing business at the time doing rock t-shirts and posters. I took a bad pay cut. The work was rather boring, but I had my foot in the door.”
As Mambo grew, the profiles of the artists behind the brand grew as well. McNeil was asked to create music posters and record sleeves for a litany of musicians, including Beastie Boys, Beck, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Pavement, and Sonic Youth. His work with Mambo also made him a sought after artist in the surf world.
“I got a call one day from Bob McTavish. I said, ‘The Bob McTavish? The surfer guy?’” McNeil says laughing. “He’d seen the Mambo boards I’d done for shop displays and said he wanted to do some boards for his label.”
When he left Sydney for Byron in the early 2000s, McNeil would take McTavish up on the offer. It was while working in the McTavish factory that he struck up a relationship with surfer/shaper Dain Thomas, who was apprenticing with McTavish at the time. Thomas, McNeil, and surfer/shaper Matty Yates would later strike out on their own to start Sea Surfboards. Then, in 2007, the trio opened the Sea Cell, an art gallery/music venue/surf shop concept that became a locus for the emerging, alternative surf movements in Australia and America.
“I knew what it took to make a little scene,” McNeil says of the Sea Cell. “My idea was, let’s get a factory like Andy Warhol and make surfboards, have a skate ramp, and have music and art shows. Let’s make it a place where people hang out.”
“Local photographers, filmmakers, artists, hot surfers, musicians, fashion designers, and other young soon-to-bes were all hanging around the Sea Cell,” says Andrew McDonald, Australian artist and curator of Byron’s Lone Goat Gallery. He also points out that the work by McNeil and other Mambo artists from the 80s and 90s served as “a gateway drug to a lot of other art” for himself and others growing up at the time.
“The surf industry in Byron [before the Sea Cell],” says McDonald, “was pretty commercial and conservative and dull, at that particular moment. The Sea Cell and its open-minded, punky ethos became very influential and I think you can still see the effects of that today. By design and osmosis, Paul mentored a lot of people at the Sea Cell, because they got to see his creative process out in the open, how to bring ideas into a tangible form. It was a DIY scene and unpretentious. Paul was, and is, generous with his enthusiasm and encouragement of younger talents.”
“He’s been such a positive force for creativity in this community,” says Brodie Jackson, who, like many others from the local surf community, first met McNeil at the Sea Cell. “He’s prolific with his own artwork, and I’m constantly inspired by how much work he puts out.”
Over the course of six years, the Sea Cell hosted art openings featuring the works of dozens of surf-adjacent and mainstream contemporary artists, from Thomas Campbell to Fiona Lowry to Andy Davis to Alex Kopps. “We had a small network at the time,” says McNeil. “It was the beginnings of the alternative surf culture and I think a lot of these people were all looking for a home. They’d come to Byron and just hang on the couch at the Sea Cell.”
Influential as it was, it was also, perhaps, ahead of its time. “We never made any money,” he says, laughing. “The surf industry is about cranking out surfboards very quickly for small profit. We were spending hours on fin color, pin-lines—we’d curate every little thing. There was a lot of love for them, but they were very expensive. We couldn’t make it financially stable.”
The Art Park, McNeil’s short-lived gallery and artist-in-residency program, recently met a similar fate, ironically shuttering just as the Industrial Estates district of Byron Bay—where both the Sea Cell and Art Park were headquartered—began to transform into the cultural hub of the town.
Back at the farm, McNeil gives me a tour of the music studio, pointing out an array of vintage microphones and tube amplifiers lined up against the studio’s retro-paneled walls. Much of the analog gadgetry came from Albert’s Studio in Sydney, where AC/DC recorded a good portion of their catalog, singing and playing on this very equipment.
Later on, McNeil is planning to head into Byron to paint a board for Jared Mell, who’s in town for the Byron Surf Festival. But right now, he’s focused on the next scene.
“There’s a new wave of really cool bands in this country,” he says, sitting down in the engineer’s chair in front of the studio’s refurbished recording console—a 1974 Neve Desk. “Hopefully they’ll want to record here. It’d be cool for them to have a place to create a new legacy of great work.”
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