Arguably his entire adult life was a work of art in continual progress. On and off the stage, David Bowie was one of the great showmen of modern times, maybe of all time. He channelled his prodigious creative energies not only into his work but into his many public guises and was one of the best-known cultural figures in the world when he died this week at the age of 69.

The one-time Bermuda resident was also a man of many contradictions. He was the mercurial Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke, an international superstar, a canny businessman and a charter member of the glitterati.

He was also an inveterate reader, a chess player and a gardening enthusiast (wife Iman used to call him, not unkindly, a “homebody”).

As a singer, songwriter and performer, his albums and concerts were as much informed by performance art, cabaret, inspired fashion choices, surrealism and musical theatre as they were by pop and rock trends.

An avant-garde artist, he was also a mainstream pop star, a Broadway and film actor, and a highly regarded painter.

A serious student of classical culture, he was first awakened to the transformative power of art when he heard Little Richard.

His ceaseless efforts to reinvent himself — both as a performer and, sometimes, in real life — made him a style icon and muse to designers and fashionistas around the world. But he often cheerfully schlepped around his Bermuda home dressed in nothing more elegant than his bathrobe and socks.

Through every costume change and each new stage persona, through every shift in musical direction and abrupt creative departure, Bowie remained thoroughly consistent only in his sometimes wild inconsistency.

His malleability and unpredictability, his dizzying stylistic transformations, served to make him both the “chameleon of rock” and one of the more endlessly fascinating and, ultimately, elusive figures in popular culture.

His first act of reinvention was when shy, socially awkward David Jones, born to working-class parents in London’s Brixton district, took “Bowie” as his stage name in the 1960s.

He immediately set about remaking his image as a type of exercise in living theatre, an extended one-man show played out in the public eye.

His artistic mission was entirely in keeping with the inventiveness and audacity that soon came to characterise his newly minted Bowie alter ego: he wanted to become the musical patron saint of lost causes and lost people, to make others who felt different embrace and celebrate those differences.

Where David Jones had been another would-be folk-rocker in a “Swinging London” milieu top-heavy with office clerks who aspired to be the next Mick Jagger, David Bowie quickly emerged as his own man with his own idiosyncratic brand of music and stagecraft (“All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience,” he once said of his trademark, experimentalist approach to music. “My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.”).

If, as Oscar Wilde said, most people are other people, their thoughts someone else’s hand-me-down opinions, their lives acts of mimicry, their passions quotations, David Bowie was always a leader of trends, never a follower.

And if David Jones lacked in confidence, the self-invented David Bowie persona had a surfeit of it.

“I suppose for me as an artist, it wasn’t always just about expressing my work,” he once said. “I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture I was living in.”

Contribute he did. From the outset he boldly championed the alienated and the marginalised in his work and in his life.

His musical styles may have changed — and changed radically — over the years, but Bowie’s songs were always thematically consistent, underpinned by conviction, fearless sincerity and a boundless sympathy for the misfits, the nonconformists and the rejected. Frequently awash with romanticism and a sense of the possible, his irresistible melodies and defiant lyrics made for songs that became anthems to generations of the displaced.

Armed with uplifting and hopeful tracks such as Win, Fame, Changes, Heroes and Rebel, Rebel and his larger-than-life stage personae, he repeatedly stormed the citadels of conformity and helped to expand the bounds of the culturally acceptable.

For decades, Bowie was a glamorous and tireless champion of women, racial minorities, gays and creative but lonely teenagers the world over (actress Tilda Swinton spoke unwittingly for millions when she said his appeal to her as a shy and insecure adolescent lay in that “he looked like he came from the same planet as me”).

Ultimately, Bowie became a towering and transcendent figure. He was embraced by the mainstream and counterculture alike, respected by the hip-hop and LGBT communities and completely at ease sharing stages with acts as diverse as Bing Crosby, Luther Vandross and “godfather of punk” Iggy Pop.

He defied easy categorisation — and actively despised the idea of ever being pigeonholed into a neat, easy-to-market creative niche.

Beneath the various masks and costumes and glitter, Bowie was a man of sparkling intelligence, impeccable taste and retiring and unassuming habits.

Former Bermuda Attorney-General Michael Scott lived next door to Bowie and his Somalian-born supermodel wife Iman in Sandys parish after they relocated here for a period in the 1990s.

Mr Scott has said of his power couple neighbours: “He was always a fascinating artist, but when I met him he was just a husband and a father.

“I didn’t see the David Bowie who was this great international artist; I saw the husband.

“I was always in awe of what he had accomplished as an artist and what Iman had accomplished as an international model, but that didn’t get in the way of us talking about ordinary things.

“ ... I was enchanted by his easygoing manner, his warmth, his sense of humour, sometimes sense of mischief. He was a deep thinker and had a powerful capacity for inquiry; he definitely possessed an inquiring intellect.

“So to be around David was an impactful experience: never boring, always pleasant.”

As Mr Scott went on to point out, Bowie, who married Iman shortly before the couple moved to Bermuda, was intent on creating a stable family life with his new bride after a long period of casual and short-term relationships and rock ‘n’ roll excesses. Bermuda was the perfect setting for them to embark on married life together, to cement their relationship away from the flash of paparazzi cameras (“You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world,” Bowie once joked. “It is.”).

Mr Scott continued: “It struck me that it was David’s supreme honour to be Iman’s husband. He was Iman’s protector, consort and prince.

“Their time in Cambridge Road had as one of its aims, in this tranquil setting, to conceive their child, and Alexandra was born shortly after they left Bermuda.”

Bermuda respected the privacy of one of the most recognisable couples in the world.

And Bowie and Iman found a home, a haven and what he once called a little bit of heaven here — “We loved it in Bermuda,” he said. “Quiet, respectful, a dreamscape atmosphere out in the part of the Island where we lived.”

Playing David Bowie in all of his many manifestations was arguably David Jones’s greatest artistic achievement.

And if his death came too soon, if the life that ended this week was an unfinished symphony of sorts, those who knew, loved and admired him can at least take solace in that the creative fires and desire for artistic expression burnt almost until his final breath (his last album, Blackstar, was released two days before his death as a “parting gift” to his fans; the new single, Lazarus, opens with the lyrics: “Look up here, I’m in Heaven ... ”).

The master showman went out as he wanted to: still plying his craft, still entertaining us, his capacity to surprise completely undiminished.

—TIM HODGSON