About Us
Welcome to
Dromeda
Hi. My name is Tarik.
I spent most of my career in finance. I was good at it, it paid well, and I'd climbed to the job I'd always told myself I wanted, managing millions in investments. The dream job, or so I thought.
What almost nobody knew about me was that I would often spend my lunch breaks walking Melbourne's art galleries. On my own. I'd studied finance, built a career in it, but the part of me that kept coming back to life was the part standing quietly in front of a painting. I never did anything with it. It just sat there in the background for years.
Something had to change
Eventually the finance world stopped giving anything back.
However well it paid, I couldn't find joy in it anymore, and the cost of staying wasn't worth it. So I resigned, and gave myself six months to figure out what else I might do.
Starting again
I tested a lot of ideas.
Most went nowhere.
Then one day I was mindlessly scrolling on my way to work, and a skateboard deck stopped me cold, someone had used it as a canvas.
A frame is flat and square and just hangs there.
A deck curves. It molds against the wall like a piece of sculpture.
I knew something new could be born here.
The idea
And because of all those years in galleries, I didn't just see a skateboard. My mind went straight to one painting
Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ.
The weight of the scene. The black void. And then the colour, cutting through the darkness like it was lit from inside.
The first Dromeda
I didn't consider anything else. I knew that was the one: spread across three decks, side by side, like an altarpiece.
If the idea was going to work, it would work on that.
The prototype
So I created a prototype to see if it held up in real life. It blew me away.
And so I built Dromeda.
See what came next.
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