Seemed to be alive

On their last night of the residency, they said they had gone for a walk in the rain and heard a distant party, or the music of a distant party - impossible to believe, they thought, after these weeks of rural quiet, and yet, every night so far, in the dark flanks of the Boydian cliffs - visible from so far away, on the other side of paddocks and trees, and a river (invisible) - they had always seen a single luminous stripe, and if they watched it they could see faint shadows moving inside it: how in fact this single stripe of light seemed to be alive.

A painting sized slit

We heard how Boyd cut a painting sized slit in his studio with a chainsaw while the photographer was having a cup of coffee so that the painting might be got out and a photograph taken from a better distance.

His studio - perhaps because it is still being used by his son - smells of turps and oil, which is to say of limitless ambition.

Furred water

She observed, later, that down at the Shoalhaven River at dusk, you might have just entered a gallery with all the lights turned off, and across the smooth water, continuing to be reflective of the rocks and leaning trees that Boyd had placed there, a defined shape of furred water runs at you in a silent, maniacal fury, and this was the bit that she wanted to paint.

Listen

Hiatus

While we were looking with white gloved hands at the more deteriorated and fragile parts of the Arthur Boyd education collection - a piece from the Nebuchadnezzer series, flaking if it flexed on perspex, drawers of oil soaked canvases cut, by the artist, from frames and left in a ship's container - I heard her say that nothing had caused such a hiatus in her work as when a gallery director had pressured her to stop using children's textas and student quality oils.