‘David Bromley runs this town’: are there hidden depths to the popular, divisive Australian artist? | Documentary films

“Bromleys are only good for holiday houses and children’s bedrooms,” Yuge Bromley tells the camera eight minutes into a new documentary about her husband, the artist David Bromley. She’s quoting a critic, of course – before scoffing that these are “two of my favourite places – the funnest places in the world!”

It’s one of a string of common criticisms of Bromley’s work that open a new documentary, Bromley: Light After Dark. They range from backhanded compliments (“Peter Pan of the art world”) and faint praise (“likable”) to withering dismissal (“purely decorative” and “mass-produced”). As opening sequences go, it’s quite a choice, and an acknowledgment that the Sheffield-born, Adelaide-raised and Victoria-based painter, sculptor and entrepreneur is as divisive as he is popular.

If you don’t think you’ve seen a Bromley: yes, you absolutely have. His work often riffs on a handful of motifs – innocent young children, topless women, butterflies, lighthouses, and occasionally some skulls – rendered in a colourful style that’s nostalgic, kitsch and shabby chic. Since his rise in the 1990s, Bromley’s mainstream ubiquity – from murals to mugs to the walls of Australia’s negative gearing class – has made him low-hanging fruit for art critics and TikTokers (“I swear David Bromley runs this town,” says one creator quoted in the film).

But his popularity persists and it’s hard not to trace the public appetite for crowd-pleasing, if occasionally empty, nostalgia and spectacle picked up by younger artists including Rone to Bromley’s influence.

The film-maker Sean McDonald spent more than five years following Bromley and his family, and the result goes some way to unpacking his art’s appeal, while also trying to make sense of the man who makes – or at least signs – the paintings.

McDonald warmly documents the tension between formula and chaos that seems to define life and work at the family’s rural base in Daylesford, Victoria. Interviews with David, Yuge, a range of critics and celebrities including David Wenham, Julia Stone and Chris Cheney, play over B-Roll of anonymous studio assistants painting away at recognisable Bromleys, as their sun-bleached leader shuffles through, preparing canvases by puncturing spray cans, distressing paintings with a steamroller, and laughing and swearing with glee.

On the oft-repeated charge of “soulless” mass-production, the film tries a few angles. At times, he is defended as part of an unabashedly commercial pop art lineage from Andy Warhol to Ken Done. At others, he’s praised as a freewheeling maverick who would make his art even if no one was buying it.

Shots of Yuge sifting through transparent sheets featuring page after page of David’s most recognisable designs shed more light on the art-by-overhead-projector process. Bromley himself admits to embracing the commercial pressures that shape his output: “Some days I do go in and paint kids over the fence, and I paint the nudes and stuff. I mean, doing my greatest hits.”

But as the film progresses, it evolves into a more nuanced portrait of mental health and art – and one that largely resists falling into familiar “troubled artist” tropes. As McDonald peers back into David’s early years, his preoccupation with Enid Blyton-esque youths peering over fences or having Boy’s Own adventures makes a little more sense when he explains the “schizophrenic happenings” that arrived around the time his voice broke. Later the premature death of his beloved older brother adds further poignancy to his endless exploration of an imagined youth.

We learn how art provided a pragmatic way to manage the anxieties that led to two suicide attempts a decade apart. Buoyed by praise of his early paintings, he latched on to the form, and while his restless, almost compulsive creation made him a rising star in the art world, it soon led him to abandon it.

Here Bromley’s enormous output is reframed as both a survival strategy and an almost democratising rebuke of his earlier brush with commercial art establishments, who sought to limit his output to control supply and demand.

Between the famous fans, the brood of paint-speckled kids and the mini-empire of galleries, shops and studios, a lesser documentary might suggest the life we’re seeing is Bromley’s happily ever after. But life doesn’t work that way. As David and Yuge take on the massive task of turning the old Castlemaine prison into a museum – a stressor if ever there was one – we are privy to moments of tension and frustration. For Bromley, “the puzzle in my head” is something that has to be pieced together one day at a time.

“Forty-six days of doing the juggle and still some days I get the knockout punch,” he tells the camera after a rough day.

But unlike his younger self, daunted by the seemingly endless expanse of life and pain that lay ahead, this older David understands better that nothing is for ever.

Bromley: Light After Dark isn’t going to change anyone’s minds about Bromley’s art. But at the very least it might inspire some interesting conversations next time you visit a rich friend’s beach house.