Summer holidays are a time when many people treat themselves to what they don’t have time for during the rest of the year.
For David Hinchliffe, it was always a chance to put aside the demands of life in local government and get the paint brushes out.
Now a full-time artist, David was a Brisbane City councillor until 2012 and at one stage, deputy mayor, but painted throughout his political career, usually during Christmas holidays at Noosa.
“All of my early work was paintings of the family at Noosa, because that’s the only time I could get off and I would spend it playing with the kids and painting the kids,” he says.
While answering a question at a recent exhibition about how he had been able to fit everything in during his career, David apologised to one of his sons, who was in the audience, “because I’d spend more time painting than I probably did playing with the kids.”
His son piped up: “I can confirm that.”
A woman in the audience later showed David a painting that she had owned for about 35 years.
“It was a painting of my wife with my newborn son, Joe, who was the one in the audience, my other son, Tom, and my wife’s sisters and their husbands playing in the surf at Noosa and I was staggered.
“I couldn’t even remember having painted it but what I was doing, I was painting the family even if I wasn’t devoting as much time to the family as I should have, and it’s now a permanent record of that time.”
David has had more than 100 solo exhibitions during an artistic career spanning more than 50 years.
He began painting and selling works at 12 and spent his teen years around adult artists, but also developed an interest in politics at the same time.
“I was torn between the world of the arts and the greasy, grimy, slippery world of politics,” he says.
“In part, I reconciled that by, at times, doing political cartoons,” he says.
“It was a nice conjunction of art and politics, but in the end, I thought I wanted to change the world for the better, so politics took control, but I stayed painting throughout my political career.”
David thinks he devoted too much time to politics and painting at the expense of his family.
“Painters can be very selfish, especially male painters. I think that’s an issue and I think that with many male painters, they become so absorbed it dominates their lives,” he says.
“I’ve studied the lives of many artists. I think many artists use the passion of painting, the compulsion, and it is an obsessive-compulsive thing. I think they use that sometimes to justify the time that they spend.”
He is grateful, though, that he was in the position he was artistically when he retired from politics.
“I did not know how to leave politics. I hung on for 25 years. It had become my life, it was the air I breathed, and I had to struggle to say to myself that I’ll give it up, but when I gave it up, the whole world opened up,” he says.
“I thought I’d be painting enough to have an exhibition once a year, but almost overnight, my work took off and so did I, travelling around the world.”
David’s work was in international galleries within a couple of years, but he still found it difficult to consider himself an artist.
“I didn’t really call myself an artist for several years after I left politics. I had imposter syndrome. [I thought] I’m not really an artist. I’m an old, has-been politician,” he says.
“But I had to get a new passport about three years after I left politics, and you had to put your occupation, and I wrote down a-r-t-i-s-t and then I knew I was actually an artist.”
David paints prolifically in his Brisbane studio in a contemporary impressionistic style, choosing acrylics over oils these days. He favours streetscapes, landscapes and figurative work but has also ventured into sculpture and photography over the years.
More than a dozen galleries and dealers in London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Perth represent his work.
David’s works will be showcased in January at The G Contemporary at Hastings Street, Noosa Heads, where he will also paint live.
“David’s works have had a far-reaching impact over the years, both nationally and internationally,” gallery directors Karen and Steve Beardsley say.
“We first worked with David a decade ago, exhibiting his work in Singapore and Hong Kong.
“We had several trips together to Hong Kong, where we exhibited David’s work and showcased his remarkable ability to live paint in front of a crowd, displaying exceptional skill and rhetoric.”
One of the most exciting things for David at this point in his career is his workshops with people evolving into artists.
“Almost every workshop I have has two or three people who go, ‘Oh no, I was told by my teacher, or a parent, that my painting’s no good, but I’ve always felt I should paint and now I’m retired, I’m going to try’,” David tells salt.
“I love working with those people. Painting had become a job for me, a lovely job, one I adored, but the thrill and joy that painting can create had dissipated. I’m so busy, I’m not doing the joy thing, but when I’m with these people in workshops, that’s the joy.
“I see the absolute excitement and astonishment they have about creating a painting that they’re proud of, that they’ll put a frame around and hang up.”
David derives great pleasure from painting with his grandchildren, too.
“Every painting that my grandchildren do is on canvas and it’s framed. I buy lots of small canvases with a frame, and the moment they come to my place and do some painting, it goes into the frame and up on the wall next to Pa’s, and that has an amazing effect on kids,” he says.
David’s other joy is found in Indigenous art. He has amassed a collection of more than 1800 works.
“Someone hooked me on Indigenous paintings, and to my shame, eight years ago, despite having painted myself for 50 years, I knew very little about Australian Indigenous art, particularly from the central region, and so I started collecting indigenous art,” he says.
“When I would paint a painting, I would use the money to buy an Aboriginal painting, and I collected about 50 or 60 within a couple of months and thought, what am I going to do with all these paintings and how do I share the discovery that I had with Indigenous art with other people who, like me, hadn’t been aware how rich, how extraordinary and complicated it was?”
David has loaned almost 1000 of his Indigenous paintings to public institutions and he estimates he spends as much time finding loan locations as he does painting.
The sharing of Indigenous art at his own time and expense is a generous gesture for a supposedly selfish man.
“Selfishness takes different forms, but I’m definitely selfish with time. For me, I’m in my seventies, I’m in the latter stages of my life, so every second counts,” he says.
“Time is my enemy and I want to make the best use of it.”