14 April, 2025

Former art teacher’s retirement yields material for debut solo gallery exhibition

Close to home… Devonport man Charles Bradley with a painting of defence fortifications on Maungauika, from his exhibition coming up at Satellite2 gallery on Victoria Rd from 12 April

A lifetime of influences is distilled into Charles Bradley’s first solo exhibition, coming up this week on home ground in Devonport.
The former head of art at Glenfield College has tapped into his design background, a love of the outdoors and scenes from his own neighbourhood.
“It’s only in my retirement that I rediscovered the time and ability to do my own work.”
Aptly, his show opening at Satellite2 gallery on Saturday 12 April, is called Rediscovered Landscapes.
It will comprise 30 to 35 pieces, divided into conventional landscape paintings and drawings and what he describes as more abstract “aerial landscapes”.
Local subjects are a painting of the boatyard on King Edward Pde and interpretations of military fortifications on Maungauika.
Bradley, now 74, says with teaching’s increasing administrative load, he was happy to retire nearly 10 years ago. “I’ve had so many things to do,” he tells the Flagstaff. “I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve never felt better – happy and content – very lucky to live here, in this environment.”
Although he grew up in Hawke’s Bay, his connections with this area go back well before building a family home in Narrow Neck 34 years ago.
“From the late 1950s and 1960s, as a kid, we used to come to Devonport for holidays.” A regular house swap with family friends in Calliope Rd enabled the youngster to get to know the area, where later he and wife Penny brought up their two children.
“I spent my youth walking these streets, climbing up the maunga, looking at the boatyards and going out to Stanley Bay.” The beaches were a particular attraction.
For Penny, a keen ocean swimmer, they still are. Bradley, a former tramper, enjoys regular walks up the maunga.
Landmarks are equally a theme of his art and recollections. As a child in Havelock North he was often up Te Mata peak drawing and making maps. The fascination with landforms seen from above was influenced by a book of aerial photographs he was once given. “If I’m ever in an aircraft I’m always the one by the window,” he says.
After graduating from the Ilam School of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury, majoring in graphic design, Bradley headed overseas. Seven years knocking about in various jobs followed, mostly in southern France and the United Kingdom, where he ended up working in commercial art. It was only on settling back into marriage and a family that he turned to teaching art, with much of that career at Glenfield College.
“I never imagined I would go teaching, but I loved it,” he says.
The demanding job put paid to doing much of his own artwork, however, and after “many, many years” he was ready to sign off.
Having rediscovered his own creativity, he draws on his early practice.
“It’s quite graphic. Even the paintings are that way,” he says.
In some works he has combined bird’s-eye views with the patterns of a computer motherboard. This taps back into his interest in the marks people make on the land and in playing with graphic sensibilities by manipulating computer componentry.
“The motherboard is there and deconstructed and painted over the top.”
The abstracted aerial works range from A4-sized – to match the size of a motherboard – to tiny frames.
Some of his other landscapes are much larger, including one that imagines a series of scenes Captain James Cook may have encountered on visiting New Zealand. For this, he drew on early lithographic prints and his own vision of vistas around the country, showing pa on headlands and the Endeavour at anchor.
Rugged landscapes he is familiar with from tramping in the deep south are also referenced.
As to how he feels about exhibiting on his home patch, he says: “I use the analogy of a dog rolling over and revealing your soft underbelly – you’re very vulnerable.”
But he says time has made him more relaxed. “It is what it is.”
With the insertion of a stent, a knee reconstruction and a ruptured achilles tendon behind him, he relishes what he has, including the sustenance of creativity.
“A love of art, it gives a dimension to life.”