Exhibition themes Big paintings

Big Pictures

By the time Boyd painted the very large works on display in this room, he was living with his wife, Yvonne, in a picturesque cottage at Ramsholt in the Suffolk countryside in England. This was a place of escape where he could concentrate on his art without too many intrusions. Even though the studio in the garden was almost as large as the cottage, he was not able to accommodate the scale of these paintings. In a spirit of ‘making do’ that harked back to his childhood, Boyd dug a trench along one wall of the studio. As his son Jamie Boyd recalled:

He had a trench in the studio against the wall, about 3 foot deep. At the bottom of the trench there was a huge cylinder roll—like a canvas cylinder roll—and another at the top. With some pulleys the canvas was able to move up and down … that way the size [of the canvas] could be accommodated and it would rotate without the sides touching. The wet paint would just go up one side so part of the painting was coming up the other side, behind.

All of the large paintings in this room are meditations on being an artist and the act of painting. In Suffolk landscape, figure and book, the figure of the artist seems ghostly and ephemeral. He paints on his canvas looking over at the large open book that might represent much of the great literature that informed Boyd’s world. It may also reflect the struggle for a writer facing the blank page that echoes the challenge for the artist facing the blank canvas.

Boyd was able to see the forest from inside the studio. The windows went from floor to ceiling, so he would just look out the window while he was painting. Reflecting on his Suffolk landscapes he remarked that there were parallels with the Australian bush in the tall vertical trees ‘except that the tonal value is completely different. The actual penetration of light is changed’.