By arts editor HELEN MUSA

It may be quite common for Australian journalists to combine fiction writing with their day job, but fewer call themselves visual artists.

Well-known Canberra journalist Neil Lade is one such exception and his coming solo exhibition at Ainslie’s Q Gallery, Mixed Up, will serve as proof that he’s never not been an artist.

When I catch up with the overly-modest Lade for a chat at Smith’s Alternative, I find there’ll be no fewer than 30 artworks in the petite gallery, eight or nine of them paintings and the rest sketches. All are for sale.

It’s a mix of old and new works, a journey through various headspaces and periods of time, from the early 1980s to the present. The works are surreal, weird and comical, sometimes all three. The show also includes larger abstract works, mostly in acrylic on canvas or wooden board.

Now happily retired from full-time work, Lade can look back on a long life in words and images. It is a matter of pride to him that, apart from a few night classes years ago, he’s not art school trained, but has pursued his love of colour with a sense of freedom.

“I just go with the flow of my mind,” he says.

His journalistic career traces back to his school days when poet Geoff Page, not that much older than Lade, was his English teacher and told him, “You can write.”

Page had him reading his compositions, often very surreal creations, out loud to the class. “People laughed, in a good way,” Lade reports.

But all the while, behind the scenes, he was sketching. His uncle, the noted Tasmanian artist Owen Gower Lade, had struggled to make a living from art, so his father, a naval officer, was against his studying art, suggesting instead, “What about journalism?”

With hindsight, Lade wonders whether journalism might not be just as dangerous a profession.

“I don’t live for money, but I didn’t want to live in a garret either,” he says.

With that in mind, after studying history, politics and journalism at the old Canberra CAE, he entered The Canberra Times as one of its first graduate cadets in 1973.

“I was an angry, ambitious person. I wanted to succeed, and I did,” he tells me.

Soon enough, Lade won a Young Writers’ Fellowship, giving him six months away from work to grow up and blow all his money.

Then he went to Sydney, where he worked for a short while at the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Women’s Weekly before being offered a senior job as deputy production editor at The Australian by David Armstrong.

Sharing a Chippendale terrace with a colleague, he had his own studio where, on his rare days off, he could paint and draw. It was a great time but, after saving some money, he took leave without pay in 1983 and backpacked around Europe.

Back in Australia, he heard that The Canberra Times was looking for sub-editors, applied, and settled into journalism, art and family life.

But, he says, he can’t remember a time when he didn’t sketch and paint, mostly abstract works, with Dada and Surrealist master Max Ernst among his greatest inspirations. Oh yes, and he loves Brett Whiteley.

“I do love colour,” Lade says. “I’m a spontaneous artist.”

Maybe, but he has also sketched more formally in pen and ink, with strong influences from Japanese art, a country he has visited five times.

“I paint what I see and what I imagine,” he tells me, referring to a tiny profile of a samurai dressed up as a punk.

While he worked in oils for a time, the smell around the house became too much, so these days he mostly paints in acrylic on Masonite board, favouring surfaces that don’t require expensive framing.

Lade, though he plays it down, has enjoyed some success. In 2023, all but two of his 25 pen-and-ink sketches sold in a solo exhibition called Time Warped and, in 2025, he won second prize at the Radford College Art Show for a painting called Amerunica.

He’s also pleased to report that a family friend owns 12 to 14 of his paintings, hanging in his home in Los Angeles.

Best of all, that same friend commissioned Lade to create a surreal mural for his swimming pool.

Neil Lade: Mixed Up, Q Gallery, Ainslie Shops, July 24 to August 6.

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.