Hippy Days, Arabian Nights by Katherine Boland

Author:Katherine Boland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wild Dingo Press
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The next three years were all about my art. I was single when I flew to France to undertake a two-month studio residency in a medieval village in the Dordogne; a long-held dream come true. After a lengthy stint of city life, it was a joy to be in the countryside again; to glean materials from the surrounding environment and incorporate them into my work. I experimented with 300-year-old oak beams I found at a recycled timber yard, unrefined beeswax I bought from a local honey farm and beige-coloured clay which I dug from a river bed on the edge of the village. I discovered bru de noi—a stain distilled from walnuts that can be used like ink and la chaux—a powdered limestone which I added to paint to make impasto medium.

As a self-confessed Francophile, I’d been learning French on and off for years and when I wasn’t at work in my gloomy but extremely atmospheric, slime encrusted, stone-walled studio—a dungeon in the twelfth-century I was told, I’d wander through the cobble-stone streets in the village; dropping into la boulangerie, la charcuterie or la fromagerie, not only to sample or purchase the produce but also to practise my French. One weekend, I came across a local flea market called un vide grenier, meaning ‘empty attic’. Haggling with the wily stall-holders, I managed to get a good deal on a blowtorch, a cast-iron saucepan, an electric hotplate and some second-hand carpentry tools. I’d been inspired to make sculpture; to create a body of work I’d entitle Beyond the Black Stump—that iconic Aussie expression that spoke to how far I was from home.

I spent the following days sawing and chopping my oak beams into smaller, roughly-hewn blocks before charring them with the blowtorch; scraping back the residual charcoal with a chisel to fashion the shape I desired. Next, I cooked up a batch of encaustic medium—a concoction consisting of beeswax and dammar resin crystals melted together in a saucepan on the hotplate. In thrall of the eerie gothic setting, I applied the warm, golden syrup to the blackened cubes of oak, breathing in the heavenly perfume of burnt wood and molten wax; the base notes so redolent of the Australian bush and a medieval church.

By the end of the residency I’d produced a considerable body of work—sculpture, paintings, ceramics and photography. I invited the locals to an exhibition in my studio and was delighted to witness the pleasure they took in seeing their village interpreted through an outsider’s eyes.

It was that same year that I first set foot in America. I was fifty-two. I’d been awarded a scholarship—a studio residency at the Art Students’ League of New York’s residential campus situated on the outskirts of Sparkhill, Rockland County, a small and tidy town on the Hudson River, forty-five minutes’ drive from Manhattan. It was February so the imposing 1820s, three-storey weatherboard mansion with its profusion of steep, slate-gabled rooves, dormers, bay windows and a tower, sat in fifteen acres of woodland (home

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