DALE FRANK
WHAT WERE THE YOUNGER DALE FRANK’S INTERESTS?
David Bowie, Lou Reed, Television’s album Marquee Moon, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Beethoven, geology, geography, maps of all kinds, European history, Napoleon, Hitler, Modern Art, all modern architecture (except Frank Lloyd Wright), Shaun Cassidy, physics, astronomy, Kenya, Tanganyika, Mark Rothko, everything on television, all movies, astrology (especially Virgo with Scorpio rising), exotic gardening, Dunhill and Kent cigarettes, money.
Were you inspired by any teachers?
No. From the age of 15, my high school art teacher Robert Robertson, also a painter, would enter my name in state art prizes. After a time, I was invited and exhibiting in group exhibitions (Wynne Prize, AGNSW; Cooks Hill Gallery, Newcastle). I was invited to the Mildura Sculpture Triennial when I was 16. I was hiring buses, organising bus tours to rabbit warrens along the Sturt Highway as sculpture installations; and starting a public petition locally to have Mildura join Adelaide time, 30 minutes behind, as sculpture. Then the following year finishing high school. I was invited by Noel Sheridan, director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, to do several “artist in residences”.
“Payment for sales usually involved taking the train to Geneva to be fitted out with shirts and outrageously expensive suits, or finding out you had a fully paid penthouse apartment, with a butler, on a beach in the Canary Islands for three months. All the while you lived from one dinner invitation to another.
What about tertiary art institutions?
In 1979, I moved to Europe and considered active participation in the international art world to be the “best”
