Artist Biography

Painting has always been a great love, even from an early age, along with the love of music, that I took right through to the end of high school. Growing up on the northern beaches of Sydney, there was always a freedom to explore the native bush, which we had an abundance of. Obviously the beach wasn’t too far away, so that was a great inspiration for much of my early work also. I was always encouraged to paint and to continue with music pursuits, even though it wasn’t considered very macho at the school I attended. But all the same, it was art that I pushed on with.

My major work for year 12 was selected as one of the best in the state for the year, was a painting, inspired by the work of Salvador Dali and my love of architecture. I applied to go to Sydney College of the Arts & Alexander Mackey, two highly regarded art colleges in the country at the time. At the same time, I also sent off up to 100 application letters to the best advertising agencies in Sydney.

It all happened in the same week, two acceptance letters from the art colleges and one acceptance to join, which at the time was probably one of the best of three advertising agencies in the country. A little bit of a dilemma occurred for a week or so. Unlike the Art Colleges, which give a fair amount of time to accept, private enterprise was not quite so flexible, it was to be a quick decision. Yes, the advertising agency won, I’d had enough of school and was really looking to join the real world, a choice I’m glad I made. Although, the first week was to set a real challenge, in finding out that they hadn’t put on a junior Art Director for seventeen years. Hence, I had to let many of the other recruits leapfrog into other departments, before landing the job I was so destined to do. An Art Director in a large multi National Advertising Agency.

The experience was fantastic. It set me on a path for an exciting career, which I certainly don’t regret. During my early advertising years, I also continued painting, mainly large architectural landscapes in acrylic and quite a lot of landscapes in pastels. I also pursued music, playing in a duet in numerous pubs around Sydney. After working in several highly regarded Advertising agencies in Sydney as a senior art director and marrying my beautiful girlfriend Annie, whom we met at one of the agencies we worked at together, we decided to make a change and move to Brisbane.

There I joined Queensland’s largest owned advertising agency as a senior art director. After a couple of years there, it was time to go out on my own with a writer I had met from another agency. While freelancing, we pitched for a major Brisbane account, against three large agencies and won the business.

That was the start of ‘Phillip Tamblyn Art Direction’, a boutique design company that went on to pick up many small to medium sizes businesses throughout the South East Queensland area. After a successful five years, it was time to corporatise our  business and ‘Fire Advertising and Design’ was created.

My wife Annie, joined the business as Client Services Manager and went on to have a successful business.

Painting was still niggling at me and although I had dabbled throughout these years, I was now in a better position, to take a more active pursuit to spend a lot more time in doing something that I had longed to pursue.

After just finishing renovating our home in Mexican influences, of which I’ve admired their use of bold and beautiful colours for many years, ‘Fire Fine Art & Design’ was created. Their use of prime colours took to me, inspiring me to work with that vivid colour palette that can be seen through my paintings in the series ‘Colours of Australia’.

After touring Italy in late 2009, I was taken by the painting of the communities’ historic buildings. Having a keen interest in architecture and knowing that our own communities’ have a bevy of wonderful buildings, the series ‘Urban Textures’ was created. Delving into Brisbane’s past heritage and bringing some of its’ civic buildings to life, like you’ve never seen before.

A textural and vivid colour journey, through fragments of our communities’ historic buildings and civic structures. As Brisbane and surrounds has a wonderful selection of somewhat unusual and diverse buildings, it seemed fitting to capture them as part of the ‘Urban Texture’ series.