David Bromley - Awareness
- Dec 9, 2024
- 3 min read
David Bromley is an Australian artist who is most well known for his paintings of children, birds, butterflies, and female nudes. Bromley was born in England in 1960 and moved to South Australia at a young age, where he lived throughout his young adulthood and continues to live now with his wife. Although he left school at 14 years old, he ended up attending the Adelaide College of the Arts and used his time there to develop his style and type of work.
While Bromley originally worked as a potter, he emerged as a painter in the 1980s with a bold and vivid style. His work mostly falls into two categories: that of children, and that of female nudes. He's painted portraits of celebrities such as Kylie Jenner, and his work is widely regarded for his depictions of women. Bromley's style is figurative, daringly colorful, and uses textures and layering to create even more interest. He gains inspiration from artwork of children's books, as well as from other well known pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He also paints on different media, including canvases, wood panels, and cloth. Additionally, although I am not focusing on them, his sculptures continue his themes of women and children, many of them referencing or seeming similar to paintings that he has done; continuing these themes throughout different types of work brings a cohesive quality to his body of work.
Paper Boy
Polymer on canvas
120cm x 90cm
Rosie
Original polymer and silver leaf on canvas
150cm x 120cm
Butterflies
Polymer and silver leaf on canvas
150cm x 180cm
One of the things that really draws me to Bromley's pieces is his interesting use of colors. All of his pieces look like they could have been spray painted on a wall, and I really enjoy that quality. The colors have an arbitrary quality as well, blending seamlessly into each other. His line work, especially on all of his portraits of women, is very striking and makes the details of the piece, most noticeably the eyes, really pop. Like the colors, the thick black lines look like they could be seen in graffiti artwork and I find them super interesting; the difference in line weight makes each area different, and his subtle hatching creates a nice contrast to the thick sections of color. Some of Bromley's work looks almost a little rough around the edges, and I think that is something I would like to play with in my own work. It could be really interesting to mess around with different qualities of work, or even creating a painting and then roughing it up on purpose. I also find Bromley's contrasting subject matter very interesting, and almost something that mimics his contrasting use of color; the difference between explicit portraits of women and innocent, child-like paintings of children keeps his work fresh and creates new opportunities for bodies of work. I enjoy Bromley's motif of butterflies that he carries throughout a lot of his work, and I think it could be cool to find something of a similar idea to include within my own work.
Bromley and his wife, artist Yuge Bromley, now own Bromley & Co. Galleries in South Yarra and Daylesford in Australia, and they both collect work as well as continue to make it. He has been widely exhibited in Australia, as well as in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America, and has been a finalist for the Archibald Prize six times. Bromley continues to be an acclaimed artist and a huge reflection of the impact of the Pop Art movement.
Bromley's work:
CV:
Bromley has had solo exhibitions since the mid-1980s, and since then has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in Australia. Here are his 10 most recent exhibitions:
2024 Tripoli Gallery, New York, United States
2020 Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide, Australia
2019 Tripoli Gallery, New York, United States
2018 Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide Australia
2015 Union Square, California, United States
2014 Union Square, California, United States
Bromley's company Bromley & Co. has displays from both Bromley as well as artists he collaborates with.
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