124 VOGUELIVING.COM.AU
this page: in the family room, candyfloss pink walls; ‘small’ sample of
Frank’s taxidermy. opposite page, clockwise from top left: exterior,
the 1860s homestead. The Georgian-inflected rooms are decorated with
a Wunderkammer of wild animals. Collectable taxidermy of Gary Pegg
and 19th-century British master Rowland Ward; the CAMPANA
brothers’ ‘Favela’ chairs for Edra. Dale Frank in his studio.rom the first entreaty to photograph the Hunter Valley
home of Australian artist Dale Frank to his final accord to
let Vogue Living record it, more than a year has elapsed,
which is hardly surprising given Frank’s withering
indifference to social propriety and the press. Indeed, his
disregard for the opinion of others is legendary and more
than occasionally leaks into the subtexts that attach to his
colour slicks. Only after did it occur to him that she was the
bitch that wrote the nasty article on her blog (2014) snarls
the title of one visceral contusion of black and blues.
Such scathing little speech bubbles are meant to be nothing more
than the mental input at the moment of Frank’s art-making, but they
forewarn of a sharp sensitivity to the critics whose ‘clackers’ he refuses
to kiss. We know to proceed cautiously with Frank, but we also know
that this self-contained master — sanctified by Pulitzer-winning art
critic Sebastian Smee as one of only nine living Australian artists
“likely to be celebrated well after they are gone” — enjoys the mythos
and the making of extraordinary private worlds. We’ve been there,
done that and revelled in his decorative iconoclasm.
So, when Frank finally gave the green light, VL summarily sped to
a hill north-north-west of Sydney, where a sandstock-brick homestead
circa 1860s sits high above an 18-hectare property enveloped by
a sweep of the Hunter River. Records reveal that the estate’s Georgian-
inflected home belonged to a succession of significant early owners,
including retail scion Edward Lloyd Jones (son of David Jones), who
supposedly spun the purist structure into an Edwardian palace. The
property’s decline into late 20th century ignominy was precipitated by
a series of feckless farmers who sought to ‘modernise’ it.
Or so says the moustachioed Frank when finally we meet in the
soaring kitchen-heart of a homestead that acid-trips back to the mid-Victorian era. “They put old pipes under the floor to hold it up,
removed the big cedar double front doors and installed aluminium-
framed windows,” says Frank, in aggrieved high-pitch. “Aaaand they
covered the walls in velvet fleur-de-lis flock to hold it all together.”
Mocking this “piss-elegant” attempt to paper over quartz-crushed,
hard plaster walls that once sparkled under gaslight, while protesting
that his nine years of restoration efforts are not yet ready for the reveal,
Frank offers coffee in porcelain cups while plotting the course of his
day. “You can do what you want, go anywhere,” he says before
decamping to his studio. “But your schedule started 15 minutes ago.”
Dale looks to his watch, announces lunch will be served at 12:29 “on
the dot”, downs the coffee that he says will later cause dyspepsia (it does)
and waves a pink Perspex ruler at two pony-sized wolhounds, who are
working the crew for crumbs. Their “dinosaur bones” are strewn across
a flagstone floor Frank says was brought back to brilliance by a bunch of
teenage boys who chiselled away at its concrete cover for weeks.
He parlays that ditty (Dickensian in its overtones) into details
about the Union Jack that drapes high above his seven-oven AGA
cooker. “It is the last whimper from the British Empire Club in Bombay,”
he says, on the back of chatter about Britain’s Brexit from the EEC.
“History has a tendency to repeat.”
And that it does in a neighbouring dining-room that has been
reinstated with the design bravura and Darwinian obsessions of the
architecture’s originating era. Surprisingly Frank hangs none of his art
on home walls, which may be the marker of gifting 85 of his ››