How 90-Year-Old Norman de Brackinghe Recently Became an Ink Artist

From the moment he was born 90 years ago, the odds were stacked against Norman de Brackinghe becoming an accountant or lawyer. The artist and photographer was born in Hertfordshire north of London to a family of painters and engravers, and when he left school, he started out as a lithographer. This month, de Brackinghe is not only celebrating his 10th decade, he has a new exhibition on show until December 15. 

Hong Kong Ink & Lens brings together 50 ink paintings and 50 abstract photographs, creating an interesting dialogue between the two formats. De Brackinghe says that his interest in ink painting started recently, during the pandemic, when he had less opportunity to go out and take photographs. He credits a fascination for Japanese woodblock prints for inspiration, along with his discovery of ink-loaded brushes, allowing him to work with a single colour: black. He says he enjoys exploring the complexity and simplicity of just using one colour. 

De Brackinghe’s ink works capture the coastlines of Lamma, Lantau and the south side of Hong Kong Island, among other landscapers. They’re on show at LAB Collector Hong Kong, where proprietor Ambrose Leung has used de Brackinghe’s works to interlink the colours and textures of his own objects on display. 

When de Brackinghe first arrived in Hong Kong nearly 50 years ago, in 1976, he found himself in demand for English watercolour landscapes. He later moved onto abstract photography, which he has exhibited both locally and internationally. What he captures is often a seemingly ordinary moment, spotted whilst travelling on a minibus or walking along a street, but seen in a very distinct way. Sometimes it’s peeling paint that catches his eye, or a scrap of poster, and in his photograph he creates a whole new work of art. He’s a big fan of French painter Nicholas de Staël and American abstract painter Mark Rothko. That and his own decades in design are reflected in his photography. 

“From accident, obliteration, scrawl and neglect has come an art which captures Hong Kong’s energetic, distinctive personality,” designer Henry Steiner — de Brackinghe’s good friend — has previously said of the artist’s work.  

“Henry is just slightly older than me,” says de Brackinghe of his regular lunch partner born in the same year. “We’re both dogs on the Chinese calendar.”

De Brackinghe works out of a light-filled studio in Causeway Bay that has an enviable view over Happy Valley. There are examples of his abstract photography on the walls, along with a rooster painting by a friend of his, with coffee and kettle in a little booth to the side and a CD player for another major lifelong love – jazz. De Brackinghe grew up with music, albeit classical, but would scoot off to London jazz clubs for the sounds of Humphrey Littleton and George Melly. 

“I grew up with lots of books and music, because my father was a very good violin player,” he says. “He was actually first violin in a semi-professional orchestra. My father was [also] a photo engraver, very good at colour separation. In fact, one of his jobs was going to art galleries with a bromide print and copying the colours of an original so that he could get a good reproduction. My grandfather was a wet plate camera operator in the same sort of business. My father’s brother was an antiquarian bookseller, so I’ve always been surrounded by books and images.”

De Brackinghe first attended the School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography in Bolt Court, just off Fleet Street in London, before getting a job as a lithographer at a company that produced posters for companies, including travel posters and large posters for railways. “I worked then on posters sometimes in as many as 15 colours, all hand drawn,” he recalls. “I lived with a pencil or a pen.  And in that respect, Henry Steiner and I are similar. We think with a pencil. We draw ideas. And I still do that. I think in that sort of imagery.”

At the age of 18, de Brackinghe’s working life was interrupted by compulsory national military service. He ended up in an army printing unit in Singapore for two years, which marked his introduction to Southeast Asia. Once he was demobbed, de Brackinghe went to work for Penguin Books, thriving under the influence of two men: the company’s co-founder and creative genius Allen Lane, who encouraged de Brackinghe’s painting and drawing skills, as well as the Italian graphic designer and head of design Germano Facetti.  

“The great thing about Penguin Books is that they actually had a typography department and so [the books] were always beautiful,” he says. “[Other] paperback publishers used to send their typescript to the same typesetters and just say: ‘Set as Penguin’s.’ So Penguin set the standard for how books or paperbacks should look. It was a great experience.”

In 1956, de Brackinghe was called back for national service as a reservist when the UK, France and Israel invaded Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. De Brackinghe was sent to Cyprus to work for the Department of Psychological Warfare, helping to create propaganda leaflets to be flown and dropped over Egypt. The imagery, which included caricatures of Nasser with a big bushy moustache, or a poor Egyptian looking up at the bombs raining down from the sky, was created by famed illustrator Ronald Searle, better known for his illustrations of the anarchic girls’ boarding school, St Trinians, and later cats. 

After Penguin, de Brackinghe later worked under Hamlyn Books founder Paul Hamlyn as a technical advisor. “My function was to work with designers, production people, editors and authors to deal with photography, to try and get the best result on paper from the work that was available,” he says.

The other part of his job was to go and see how his work appeared after printing. Hamlyn printed in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Czechoslovakia. “So I used to go to Prague probably every two months,” says de Brackinghe; after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he would take everyday items needed by his printing colleagues in Prague, including spark plugs. 

In the mid-1970s, an Italian printing group based in Verona, Mondadori, offered de Brackinghe a job. At the same time Paul Hamlyn was looking to set up Mandarin Publishers in Hong Kong to create high quality books and asked de Brackinghe to oversee the operation. He had already experienced Singapore so the decision to go to Hong Kong was an easy one. “I was enthralled in a sense by the place,” he recalls. He spent his early days driving between printing shops in his Toyota. 

For de Brackinghe, that sense of being enthralled has never gone away. He continued as a book specialist while developing his own photography and art and has held more than 20 exhibitions in Hong Kong. Married twice, one of his sons is a musician in the Philippines, the other a school teacher in Hong Kong. For many years de Brackinghe would head to jazz clubs to watch local and international musicians. As well as being an artist, he’s also a published poet, his favourite format being the Japanese 17-syllable, three-line haiku.

In his studio, de Brackinghe flicks through a previous exhibition catalogue of his abstract photography. “Take this one here,” he says, “taken in Stanley. Now that’s the bottom of a boat. It’s where the paint has been scraped away and the boat’s been turned upside down. But it looks so deliberate, but it isn’t at all.”

He points out another photograph he took in Qingdao. “You’ve got a painted surface with something over the top of it where the sun and the wind has peeled various bits away and it leaves a sort of nice patina and it looks as though it’s been contrived,” he says. “It doesn’t look as though it’s just happened and that’s the sort of thing that I’m looking for all the time.”

Hong Kong Ink & Lens runs until December 15, 2024 at LAB Collector in North Point. Click here for more information.