biography

David George Rose was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1936, to George Linney Rose, a commercial artist, and Aubrey (née Trevelyan).

Educated at Melbourne Grammar School, Rose displayed artistic ability at an early age, winning various juvenile painting competitions. As a young teenager, all his pocket money was saved to buy books about his favourite art idols, firstly Paul Klee, then also Lautrec, Picasso and Van Gogh.

He went on to take a degree in Forestry at the National Forestry School, Canberra. At the 1957 Forestry School Ball, on the night of his 21st birthday, he met Jennifer Mannigel, the daughter of an ex-serviceman orchardist in Griffith, NSW. David and Jenny moved to Sydney together in 1959 and married in 1960. Jenny, a teacher working with disadvantaged children, took the unusual (for the time) step of supporting them both while David took the leap to establish himself as a full-time artist, painting, drawing and printmaking. He was an autodidact, as in those days in Sydney fine art screen printing was in its infancy, and he had no formal art training.

The couple worked long hours together during the 1960s producing screen printed greeting cards under their own label, DAJER. With joyful, striking designs and a clean, modern aesthetic, the cards were popular with progressive retailers and galleries. David and Jenny made the card deliveries on their beloved Italian motor scooter. As a result of their labours, the couple were able to fund a passage on the Marconi line to Spain in 1964. In Barcelona, Rose studied at the commercial lithography studio of Señor Sales, producing a series of lithographs and etchings, and the couple travelled through Europe. After their return in 1965, Rose taught printmaking part-time at the National Art School, East Sydney, and continued to produce screen prints in his home studio.

In 1971 their daughter Kirsten was born, followed by a son Campion in 1973. The family had a tiny fibro holiday cottage at Bateau Bay, then three hours' drive north of Sydney. Rose's subject matter began to shift away from abstract imagery and the human form. Increasingly, his work began to reflect his interest in the beauty of Australian trees and landscapes, with impressions of Bateau Bay and its eucalypts a dominant theme. (See the 1978 interview with Rose.)

The family bought an old farmhouse, 'Hillside', at Ourimbah, NSW, moving there from Sydney in 1976. A derelict fruit packing shed on the property was converted into a capacious studio, the home of David’s printmaking for the next thirty years, with areas for etching, painting and ceramics. One section was later converted into a studio gallery.

In 1978, Rose was commissioned to produce a range of designs for Australian postage stamps. These were the first "special issue" stamps produced by Australia Post, and featured a series of four Australian trees: the Illawarra Flame, Ghost Gum, Grass Tree and Cootamundra Wattle.

During the same year, Rose was featured in an educational filmstrip series "Australian Artists", produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and narrated by Margaret Throsby (see the transcript here.)

Personal sorrow struck the Rose family when Jenny died, after a long illness, in 1982. David later met Hannelore Berry, the mother of two children, Susan and Ron. David and Hanne married in 1983, and the combined families began living together at 'Hillside'.

Rose continued to work long hours in the studio amid stints of teaching, including at the City Art Institute, Sydney. The 1980s marked an exceptionally productive period in Rose's printmaking career. 1980 also heralded Rose's fruitful foray into ceramics, supported and encouraged by potter friends John Kemety and Peter Rushforth.

Rose's exceptional technical skills as a printmaker enabled him to express a fine intuitive understanding of the Australian natural environment, and his work increasingly received international acclaim. In 1996, he and Hanne traveled to Europe, visiting Hanne’s country of origin, Germany. David made a series of drawings and gouaches in France, in particular around Arles, a tribute to his much loved Vincent van Gogh. His output of screen prints, drawings and gouaches remained consistently high during the next ten years.

Rose’s legacy is a body of elegant, meticulous and joyful work that conveys his skill, subtlety of perception, and love of the natural beauty of the world around him. The intense inner drive which produced it compelled him to continue working at pace, even beyond the time when physical illness rendered new editions of screen prints an impossibility. After a printmaking career spanning half a century and nearly fifty solo exhibitions, David Rose passed away in 2006.