Self-taught artist David Brown has been brightening up the beaches with his colourful murals for years. The Wheeler Heights local tells Peninsula Living Pittwater about his lifelong love of art.
David Brown turned up to an interview for an animator job at 17, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a portfolio of his artwork in a garbage bag.
As he passed the whispering, mostly older, suits with their leather-bound portfolios, he might have been intimidated and walked back out the door.
Instead, he emptied the plastic bag of his ‘best drawings’ onto the interviewer’s table and was offered the job. Although the interviewer did turn his back to David a couple of times to have a giggle. That’s how good David was, even back then.
“It was my biggest break,” David tells Peninsula Living Pittwater. “I was there for two years and worked on five feature films.”
David, now 60, started drawing at a young age and remembers creating caricatures of people at the old Manly Hospital when he was about seven or eight. As an adult, his beautiful murals adorned the children’s ward.
When work dried up at the animation company, David went into T-shirt design. “I put out about 12 designs a week over nine years in the 80s,” says David. “I would always have ideas. I always had my (drawing) pad.”
“I just love it, I’m always going to come up with new ideas.”
Then David was introduced to airbrushing and loved it. Airbrushing is a technique that uses compressed air to draw paint from a bottle through a fine airline tube. The paint is then sprayed on. David says you can even paint fine lines.
David draws his mural outlines first, before filling it in with white as a good base, then painting his scene.
His ideas go straight from his mind onto the canvas. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like ’til the end,” David laughs.
His first mural was a wizard with a big wave behind him, and this led to murals at nightclubs, people’s homes, cars, bikes, and boats.
For the past 25 years, David has been painting murals on the rides at the Easter Show after his mural of celebrities was spotted at a nightclub in Kings Cross.
He once painted a mural on a developer’s $7 million helicopter which was subsequently used by Kerry Packer to fly his business associates around Sydney during the 2000 Olympics.
One of the murals of a Clontarf scene that David painted at the Balgowlah RSL in Seaforth brought an old lady to tears. She had spotted her late husband’s boat in the painting and cried as she didn’t have a photo of it.
“She gave me the biggest hug and a kiss on the cheek,” says David. “She said she can come up daily to see it.”
Next to the Clontarf scene is a mural of Manly surf lifesavers riding the waves in boats, and another of Manly beach stretching languorously towards Queenscliff.
David also sculpts life-size figures from polystyrene before spraying them with a hard coat and painting them. He has created a shark on a surfboard for Jamberoo Action Park, and two lifelike waves for a Sydney Mardi Gras parade Speedo float, to name a few.
He has illustrated two eBooks, painted 90 signal huts along train lines from Sydney to Wollongong and has airbrushed for the Tamworth Music Festival and the Bathurst 1000. Recently he has been transforming 60 actors at the Fearaphobia Scream Park in Queensland into ghoulish monsters with face and body make-up.
David’s also painted many Christmas scenes on shop fronts all over the beaches. “All of these shops and places have been getting these done for over 20 years,” David says. “Kids love seeing Santa.”
Preferring to draw exclusively by hand; David doesn’t use computer programs for his designs. “Everything is old-school with me, which I know is bizarre.”
He lives with his wife Donna, and has two sons and a daughter, four grandchildren with two more (twins) due at Christmas and another due in April. He’s already encouraging creativity in his grandkids, helping with school project ideas.
“I just love it,” says David. “I’m always going to come up with new ideas.”
“Anything is possible,” he adds.