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Twilight Zone
The Age (Melbourne) Magazine September 2008
Susan Horsburgh
A sinister-looking ventriloquist dummy sucks on a pipe and listens from a timbre bench, while wooden circus animals salvaged from a Russian carousel sit silently on the floor nearby. Perched in a corner of the ballroom, a rabbit pageant mask presides over an assortment of bizarre objects from all over the world: oversized cartoon clocks, old-fashioned diving helmets and a glass cabinet full of chemistry beakers. Mixed among all the eccentric treasures are boys and girls plucked from a bygone era and frozen in bronze: children leapfrogging each other or skipping hand-in-hand, their schoolbags suspended in mid motion. The overall effect is intriguing and otherworldly – and more than a little creepy, like the pages of a fairytale sprung to life. A visitor cant help wondering wether the characters wake up in the wee hours every night.
The artworks and oddities look like they’ve been here for decades, like keepsake in an attic, but they are all new arrivals. When artists David Bromley first climbed the stairs to the empty rooms above a Victorian-era shop in Windsor last year, the dust was so thick he couldn’t see the floorboards (he insists the exact location be kept secret). The two top storeys of the building, which had housed hotel rooms, a clothing factory, and even a Turkish bathhouse during its 120-year history, were primarily a haven for local pigeons. In the 1970’s, artist Howard Arkley lived on the top floor and worked studio lit by the building’s huge fan-shaped feature window, leaving the outline of his spraypainted canvases on the wall, but fire restrictions had eventually hounded him out. The place had pigeon poo melded onto the once-majestic balconies and holes in the ceilings; there was no plumbing or electrical wiring in any of the 20 rooms and every wall was fretting, peeling or cracked.
The faded Victorian beauty clearly needed more love then most renovators had to give; fortunately, Bromley was smitten. Not only that, he was he man for he job: the artist and his partner, designer Tori Dixon-Whittle, were veterans of about 30 home renovations, true remodelling masochists whose projects had included a disused flour mill, an old church and an abandoned stone cottage inhabited by sheep. Bromley, a self-described “building hunter”, says he was attracted to the space’s “emotional presence”. Far too many beautiful facades, he says, have been destroyed in favour of soulless aluminium shopfronts. “To me, it just had this incredible value,” says Bromley, who signed a 12-year lease. “It was a place I wanted to be in, I wanted to do things in.”
Newly arrived from his hometown of Adelaide, the five-time Archibald Prize finalist and lifelong fossicker had found his headquarters. The industrial scrubbers were called in, but the couple were loath to sanitise the place. “We didn’t want to tidy it up too much because the patina was what gave it such an emotive feel,” says 35-year-old Dixon-Whittle, who likens the space to the fictional wardrobe leading to Narnia in C.S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “There was this wonderful feel of faded grandeur and once you apply too much of the modern world it really does change the feeling of a place.”
The pair left some of the ceiling holes unpatched and installed old-style cloth-covered cord lighting. The rooms, which vary in size, were furnished as workshops, salons, a dining room and a bedroom, although no one would live there. The “Three Bears” room features a grand old four-poster from France (next to two other beds, medium and baby-sized) but no one sleeps in it. Bromley seems exasperated when asked if anyone does. He can’t understand why visitors to the space are “so literal”: “ I get asked all the time ‘What’s it for?’ and people get quite upset. I’ve had people really angry with me, like architects. They go ‘What is it? What are you doing here?’ and I don’t even know myself yet.”
It could be called a folly, he says, but it’s no plaything: Bromley is an artistic entrepreneur with major international commitments and a staff of 20. For a start, he uses the 1200-square-metre space to curate upcoming exhibitions and entertain overseas dealers. “Its an introduction to myself,” says Bromley, who usually paints in a separate studio. One of Australia’s most collectable artists, he sells his works for up to $50,000 apiece. Over the past 20 years, he has made his money by building a thriving business, selling not only his paintings (which are recreated in myriad forms, including pottery, bronze sculptures, wood carvings and embroideries) but the quirky objects he collects and the buildings he renovates in his own distinctive style. Working frenetically and sleeping just three hours a night, he keeps up a punishing pace. At the moment, for example, he has two A Day On Earth shops, in Daylesford and on Chapel Street in Prahran, where he sells his antique furniture and curios; he has painting exhibitions coming up in India, the United States, Japan and South Africa and shows of his collectables in Tunisia, the UK and New Zealand; he works with furniture makers in Latvia and embroiderers and wood carvers in Vietnam, and imports industrial pieces from Russia and Eastern Europe. He is working on two large commissioned sculptures, has two renovations on the go, and episodes of his 2005 short film I Could Be Me were recently broadcast on SBS.
In June, he bought another historic property – a stone house in St Kilda’s Blessington Street where artist Albert Tucker used to live – but he says he isn’t necessarily on a heritage-preservation quest; he and Dixon-Whittle were simply after a big family house for their two young children, and the established garden, timber floor and high ceilings appealed to him. Old buildings might sometimes be wrong and clumsy, he argues, but they have a heartbeat. Their biggest enemy is society’s “visual illiteracy”: “If people had more of a blanket feel for the value of some of these things and they treated them respectfully,” he says, “ I think those things would stay, not because there were rules governing it, but because people just valued it.” A sentimentalist, Bromley yearns for more beauty and nostalgia in modern life. “I think we live in a world where there’s pragmatism that pervades everything … a society that lacks a little bit in the wonder or the depth,” he says. “I’m fossicking for the magic.”
It’s a preoccupation evident in his childhood adventure paintings, which have been his signature images since the mid-1990’s. A long-time fan of pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated images from commercial art and popular culture, Bromley took his inspiration from the Boy’s Own journals in Britain in the first half of the 20th century. “I wanted to make paintings that resonated in some ways and I thought, the children are going to seem a bit light but, bad luck, its what I really wanted to do,” he says.
Curiously, Bromley is just as well-known for his portraits of nude women, including Megan Gale, Kate Fischer and Kristy Hinze. In his “folly”, images of bare-breasted beauties are propped up next to those of young boys playing with toy boats or blowing bubbles. If they seem like contrasting interests, Bromley doesn’t try to explain the conflict; each has its own set of collectors. In Japan, for example, he doesn’t bother showing the nudes, whereas in South Africa that’s all they’re interested in. Some critics have accused his of glossing over the world’s harsh realities but Bromley defends his work against claims of Mawkishness and naivety.
“I am far from immune to the horrors I see,” he says, “but I think one of the strongest things we need to find is that purposefulness and that gentleness and the heroic nature of being perhaps a little bit naïve or simplistic.”
Boyishly handsome in jeans, a funky striped blazer and paint-spatters shoes, the artist turns 48 next month but seems to have lost none of his own youthful optimism. Still a keen surfer, Bromley has collected more than 60 tattoos all over his body, the newest of which – “LOVE” spelt out across the toes of his left foot – he acquired just a few months ago. Despite his energy and idealism, however, Bromley has weathered more than his fair share of dark-times: he has wrestled not only with his own drug addiction but that of his 26-year-old son, Dale, and has coped with two failed marriages and the loss of hi sonly sibling, Paul, a 43 year-old fitter and turner who died a few years ago after being drugged and robbed while working in Jakarta.
Certainly his turbulent adolescence bears no resemblance to his idyllic old-fashioned images. Born in 1960 in Sheffield, England, Bromley migrated to Australia with his parents and older brother when he was three and grew up in the working-class Adelaide suburb of Torrensville. As a child he was a straight-A student with university ambitions – until he turned 14 and his chronic anxiety began. He developed a laundry list of phobias (heights, open spaced, flying, sailing…), I felt alienated and eventually dropped out of school. His homemaker mother, Sonja, and father Gerald, who worked at a trustee firm overseeing people’s wills, were at a loss. “I spent probably 10 years of my life in a hyper-panicked state,” Bromley says. “I was on so much medication what I was a kid I didn’t even know what my name was.” He’d go to doctors for help, he recalls, and they’d mock him: “I still remember at 15 having a doctor saying, ‘I don’t like my life either but I just put up with it.’ And then you got to your friends and they ridicule you. You go to your parents and the look at you lovingly but they don’t know what to do… You start drinking and doing drugs because it’s the only time you feel OK and all you’re really trying to do is run away from yourself. Suddenly you go from being a kid that feels a little bit uncomfortable to being a person that cant go outside to then being a person who cant look at themselves in the mirror.”
For the next 10 years, Bromley drifted from one odd job to another, working as, among other things, a signwriter, postman and landscaper in between stints on the dole. “I ended up in no-mans land,” he says. “I was always interested in doing something different but I had no education, I had no framework.” By the time he was 25, he was living in Noosa Heads and surfing most days, even though his agoraphobia make it uncomfortable. “I lived in a caravan and had to crawl on my hands and knees to the toilet block,” recalls Bromley, laughing. “ I was lucky enough to have a partner at that time but she didn’t hang around. You know, it’s not nice having a partner that crawls to the toilet.” After one fateful trip to the local Eumundi markets, he decided to take pottery lessons and began selling his wares. Often he was too broke to buy materials so he’s make art from stuff he found at op shops or from plastic he picked up off the beach. Within a year he began painting and before long he was offered an exhibition at the Caloundra gallery.
By the late 1990’s, he was showing in America, Europe, Asia and the UK and in 1999 was shortlisted for the Archibald Prize for the first time, but Bromley says nothing has ever come close to that discovery of his vocation in the mid-80’s, when art finally gave him a direction and identity: “It was suddenly, ‘This is what I do and thing is who I am and this is how I go about it’,” recalls Bromley. “When I was in a little rental flat I and I had a little tin shed outside with a kiln in it, to me that was it: that’s when I’d made it. I’d suddenly got a life.” These days he occasionally goes through periods of disillusionment with his art but he also realises it’s his sanity measure. “I have to do this,” says Bromley, who admitted himself to psychiatric hospitals for short stints when he was 23 and 29. “Before I was doing it I didn’t want to be who I was, I didn’t wasn’t to be in my head, so I found an avenue and I believe in it.”
Although he’s over the darkest period, which lasted from his mid-teens to his early 30’s, Bromley still hasn’t been able to shake his phobias, despite several attempts over the years. Even now, if anyone took a tour of his psyche, he jokes, they’d come out screaming. Doctors have diagnosed him with manic depression in the past, but he avoids giving his constant anxiety a name, preferring not to be boxed into a mental illness. Besides, he doesn’t want to be an artistic cliché. Bromley is a generous interviewee but he seems to be juggling so many disparate thoughts that they sometimes get lost in translation. He hops from one topic to another and occasionally forgets the original question altogether. He usually gets to the point eventually; he just takes the scenic route to get there.
When Dixon-Whittle started seeing Bromley, a complicated artist 13 years her senior, she was intrigued. Only 20 years old at the time, she had recently broken up with his assistant and Bromley’s second wife had just left him. “David couldn’t walk out in the middle of an oval, couldn’t wear sunglasses, couldn’t go above the third story in a building,” she recalls. “But for me that was never an issue because it was the sign of great sensitivity.” Fifteen years on, the two are still together. A former actor and model who has owned cafes and homeware stores in Adelaide and currently designs children’s clothing for A Day on Earth, she seems a perfect match for Bromley, with a similar creative drive. She also does a lot of the legwork: his fear of flying means it regularly falls to Dixon-Whittle to pack up their children, five-year-old Holly and 23-month-old Willem, and head overseas for buying trips and exhibition openings. Bromley hasn’t travelled outside Australia since he arrived as a three-year-old but she’s confident he’ll eventually overcome his flying phobia.
Serial renovators, the couple clearly thrive on a challenge. “It’s wild between us sometimes, believe me, and we’re both really pig-headed,” says Bromley, “but I think we’ve got a lot of respect for each other. We are competitive and I think we enjoy some things that other people do find really frustrating. The list of things that are most stressful – the loss of a loved one, renovating a house, moving – are just a daily thing for us. They are the glue for us. We’ll give things a go, not always because they make sense or we have the money to do them. We will do it just because we’re determined to do it.”
Like moving to Melbourne. Before they made the decision to uproot their lives in March 2006, Bromley and Dixon-Whittle spent six weeks driving from Adelaide to just north of Noosa, looking at real-estate windows and taking noted before finally settling on Melbourne. The idea was that they would scale back their workloads, but that plan hasn’t panned out at all. “For years I’ve wanted to try and find my peaceful place to do my thing… but with all the things that interest me and the things that I want to do, it ain’t going to happen,” says Bromley.
Not unlike his hero Warhol, who has mass-produced silk screens and lithographs at the Factory in New York in the 1960’s, Bromley sends off his paintings to have limited-edition sculptures, embroideries and carvings made by artisans overseas. A bronze might retail for $27,000, a wood carving for $7000. The Australian art world may like to think less of commercially successful artists, but Bromley says no motivation is necessarily purer that any other. “There are people who cry out that they’re not commercial but they’re still after a currency: they want intellectual or conceptual or theoretical kudos, the want to be seen as having a certain status,” he says. “I’m not against someone wanting social or intellectual outcomes. We’re all driven by a carrot. Some people say, ‘That person is only driven by money’. Well whatever rings your bell.”
So far, he says, the move to Melbourne has exceeded all expectations. Dixon-Whittle has been particularly struck by a natural appreciation of the arts among Melbournians. “It’s a little bit like Europe where people have lived with art for so long that it’s part of their vocabulary,” she says. “They like it because they like it, not because they’re trying to be someone though it.”
Before the move, Bromley was reluctant to bring the mundanity of everyday life to a city he had always loved, but that fear soon subsided. “This place just keeps unfolding its specialness to me,” he says. “There seems to be a vivacity about the town, an engagement. I lived in Noosa for 10 years and to me the sun shines more in Melbourne… There are cool old cars and everyone wears nice clothes and it’s done with flair.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the true character of a place, and Bromley is so evangelical about Melbourne that even his local friends have begun to look at their city with fresh eyes. Finding his weir, wonderful studio space has only focused his artistic future, he says, and sealed his commitment to his adopted city.
“I’m going to be really brave here and say I am a Melbournite now,” he says. “Whether they accept or want me, I don’t care, I’m stubborn. I fell at home for the first time in my life.”