PAINTER
ILLUSTRATOR
SCULPTOR
BUILDER
MAKER
AUSTRALIAN SELF-TAUGHT POLYMATH · PAINTER · SCENIC ARTIST · SIGNWRITER · MAKER
David Emerson Thomas was born in Adelaide and moved to Melbourne in 1960. "Books never taught me much - work did," he once said. A profoundly hands-on learner, he built a life in craft and picture-making. "That bias toward the hands-on has shaped everything I’ve made since - pictures, sets, signs, walls, gardens, props, furniture. If it needed doing, I learned how."
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FROM DRAWING BOARDS TO BIG BRUSHES
He began as an engineering draughtsman—pencil plans and precise views—until a chance sight of a signwriter freehanding DUNLOP TYRE SERVICE on a wall set a new course. Signwriting led to decades across Victoria painting shopfronts, vehicles and large walls, and then into television—Channel O (later Ten), Channel Seven—and he went on to build and paint sets and props for various TV shows and concerts including Neighbours, John Farnham, Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Full
Frontal, Jimeoin and many more.
Thomas painted backdrops and sets seen one day and painted over the next; learned studio lighting on the floor and colour on the fly; created weather maps, immersive sky pieces (as clouds were his signature), photographic backdrops and retail environments - among them an underground “opal mine” installation (see below). His range extended from murals to aircraft and vehicle finishes, and even clouds on a jumbo jet in Singapore.
In the mid-1990s, as the art world shifted toward digital production, Thomas embraced emerging technologies and began a new phase of his career as an expert digital retoucher and 3D modeller, translating his mastery of light, texture and realism into the virtual space.
At the height of this digital transition - and amid the growing popularity of computer-based art - he was regarded as one of the finest retouchers in Australia. He worked alongside many of the country’s leading photographers, constructing complex advertising compositions from multiple photographs and setting a new standard for digital image craft.
A CRAFT BUILT ON LOOKING HARD
Thomas’s eye is grounded in realism with a lyrical turn - clear atmospheres, believable light, and skies you can almost touch. The Australian poster master James Northfield shaped his sense of composition and place; the Heidelberg School, especially Frederick McCubbin, informed mood and memory. In recent years he has returned to oils for portraits and landscapes, valuing their capacity to be worked and reworked until a face or sky can truly breathe.
VERSATILITY - “MY TOOLKIT IS BROAD BECAUSE THE WORLD IS”
Today, Thomas focuses on studio painting - portraits, landscapes and select commissions - distilling a lifetime of practical craft into quiet canvases where light can settle and story can show. This website stands as a homage to a car eer of honest materials, true colour and a mak er’s eye. Enquiries are welcome.
Explore Thomas’s archive for a timeline of his most significant works.
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