By Amy Campion
When Mount Martha’s Dr David Freedman swapped scalpels for sable brushes, it wasn’t so much a career change as a return to his first language.
A rural surgeon working in such far-flung locations as Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific and Swan Hill, David painted to switch off. Long before that, his childhood was filled with the smell of turpentine and paint, growing up with a father who taught art at Melbourne Tech, became state artist for Victoria, and spent a decade creating a vast mural for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Despite that legacy, David’s father urged him not to pursue art as a career. It was too precarious, too uncertain, he warned. So David went into medicine and kept art as his quiet refuge. “I always loved going out into the Mallee or sitting by a river and painting,” he said.
Plein air watercolour – painting directly in the landscape – became his way of decompressing after the intense demands of surgery. Decades later he distilled what he’d learnt into Plein Air Painting: General Principles and Tips for Beginners, a gentle how-to for anyone wanting to pick up a brush outdoors.
When he retired in 2016, David’s painting became more central to his life. With Covid lockdowns and cut off from his usual plein air haunts, David turned his Mount Martha studio into a sanctuary – and a surprise visit from an eastern rosella changed everything. He painted the bird nesting in a box just outside his window, and people seemed to like it. So he painted another bird, and another. Soon he had hundreds of watercolours and the beginnings of a book.
That project grew into Australia’s Birds in 2021, followed by the expanded volume Australia’s Birds in Watercolour, a 300-plus page coffee-table book with more than 250 bird portraits, accompanied by text from his stepbrother, writer Richard Steele. Most recently, David turned his attention to our four-legged companions in A World of Dogs in Watercolour, painting 140 breeds and 283 dog portraits for the hefty volume.
“I set myself the task of painting a dog a day,” he said. “But I repainted many of them. I realised breeders would spot every mistake.” The text, by dog enthusiast Craig Whittle, matches David’s keen observational eye with affectionate, informative commentary.
For all the apparent serenity of his subject matter, David said painting with watercolour can be challenging. “If the paint runs where it shouldn’t, you can’t just scrape it back. You start again.” That discipline, honed in rural operating theatres, carries through to his studio practice. If he’s going to do something, he says, he wants to do it to the very best of his ability.
The result is work that feels both meticulous and alive. For David, that’s the magic of watercolour: its transparency and its ability to let the living creature shine through.
These days, his studio is a long way from the surgical wards of his earlier life. Yet the thread is the same: steady hands, close attention, and a deep respect for the fragile, breathing world in front of him.
