LOVE & ART IN LUXOR - PART 2

View from the studio, Luxor, Egypt

 

Excerpt From 'They Call Him Light' by Katherine Boland

After a six am flight from Cairo twenty-five artists from a variety of countries from all over the world arrived slightly crumpled and bleary eyed in the Ancient Egyptian city of Luxor. I plonked my self down on a sofa in the garish lobby of the Hotel Pyramisa and waited for the Symposium organisers to check us in. It was a long process and I was dozing when a group of Middle Eastern men entered the lobby. An artist from Romania nudged me awake and begrudgingly I rose to meet the assembly. The men were from the Ministry of Culture, the Fine Arts Sector in Cairo. I was presented to them one by one but I’d already noticed him long before he was introduced to me as our translator. He was a truly beautiful looking young man. One of those kinds of men that were too good looking, so good looking that a mere mortal female like myself usually dismisses him as out of her league. Tall, large build, a head of tight dark curls like the Emperor statues I’d seen in Rome, his eyes were gentle and brown and his lips like a living cupid. My God he even had a chiseled chin with a small cleft. By Egyptian standards his skin was quite pale and he could have passed for Greek or Italian. When he held out his hand to greet them I noticed my female companions go weak at the knees.

As we shook hands I looked up at his face and into his eyes and saw something happening to his composure, like an invisible wave washing over him. I felt something too. It was palpable. At my age I’m embarrassed to admit that my breath and heartbeat did that whole shortening and quickening thing. I quickly disengaged, sure that everyone present had noticed what had just occurred.

 

‘Katherine what are you thinking?’ I chastised myself as I scurried away to the ladies loo to catch my breath and take a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. ‘He's too young'. And more to the point, you're too old’.

We often reminisce about that first meeting in the lobby and he likes to tell his version of the story.

‘I saw you first', he recollects. ‘On the sofa’.

‘Oh my God’, I think, mentally scrambling to picture my bedraggled self back there on the couch. ‘I must have looked a wreck’.

‘It was as if I already knew you’, he continues, unaware of my dismay. ‘The second I saw you, you entered my heart and I knew that you were my destiny’.

Only an Egyptian Demi-God or a Barbara Cartland protagonist can say that sort of thing and get away with it I thought.

My hotel room at the Pyramisa, which was also to serve as my studio for two weeks, was every artist’s dream. It was a good size, light and airy and overlooked the imposing Valley of the Kings with the Nile virtually lapping at my doorstep. But I didn’t have time to savour my new surroundings for long. After a short rest we were summoned to assemble in the lobby and immediately whisked off to visit the Luxor Museum. I remember walking around the tastefully lit antiquities and bumping into him as I rounded the corner of a huge Pharoanic burial casket. Our eyes locked in that classic eye locking way and I knew, like any Egyptian slave, I was doomed.

The following night the whole menagerie of artists and organisers loaded onto an assortment of open-air wooden boats to take a short cruise up the Nile to a Nubian restaurant where we were assured there would be great food and belly dancing. When we arrived, the outdoor restaurant, decorated with colourful traditional rugs and Egyptian pin prick lanterns was packed. Groups of very merry, half sloshed and sunburned English tourists were already tucking into a smorgasbord of Middle Eastern dips, lentil soup, lamb tangine, roast chicken, flat bread and rice. As the night progressed a succession of Nubian drummers, singers, whirling dervishes and belly dancers performed for us and after we'd had our fill of the delicious food we cast off our shoes and despite our lack of technique or expertise, belly danced into the night. It was after midnight when we all stumbled back on board the boats. He signalled me to follow him as he climbed a ladder and disappeared through an opening in the roof of the vessel. It was a perfect balmy evening with the gentlest of breezes. We lay down next to each other on the flat wooden platform, gazing up at the stars as we putted back down the Nile to the hotel. We didn’t touch but the proximity of our fingers created static electricity. When we’d disembarked and everyone had retired for the evening he walked me back to my room and pushing me up against the door sneaked his first kiss, hard and insistent.

For the next two weeks the pace was frenetic. All the artists had committed to producing a body of work which would be included in an exhibition opened by the Governor of Luxor at the end of the Symposium. In the evenings we were required to attended discussion sessions in which we'd describe our individual art practise using a Power Point presentation and then answer questions about our work. Most afternoons there was organised trips to visit the ancient sites, galleries or museums. The pressure was on.

I'd undertaken a residency in the south of France earlier in the year and been inspired to use local materials gleaned from the surrounding environment to make my art. I experimented with 300 year old oak beams, unrefined beeswax I bought from a local honey farm and clay I dug from a river bed on the edge of the small medieval village in which I was staying. I was introduced to 'bru de noi' - a stain distilled from walnuts which could be applied like watercolour and 'la chaux', a powdered limestone used for centuries as mortar in the linen-coloured stone buildings of the region.

 

For the first time I attempted sculpture and created a series which I entitled 'Beyond The Black Stump'. The origin of the well known Australian expression derives from the use of fire-blackened tree-stumps used as markers when giving directions to travellers unfamiliar with the terrain and eventually evolved into a term referring to an imaginary point in the landscape beyond which the country is considered remote or unknown. The expression seemed to tap into the sense of melancholy and dislocation you can sometimes feel when you're living in a foreign country far from home. At a local flea market, called in French 'un vide grenier', meaning 'an empty attic', I practised my language skills and purchased a second hand blow torch to char oak beams, scraping back the residual charcoal with hand tools to sculpt the desired shape and then blackening the wood even further with 'poudre d'ashphalte' (powdered asphalt) to preserve it. I made encaustic medium by heating rounds of raw beeswax with dammar resin crystals and applied it to the timber sculptures. The pungent smell produced by the burning wood mixed with the melted beeswax reminded me both of my days in the Australian bush and the hushed atmosphere of a French medieval church.

When I arrived in Luxor I'd already decided that I wanted to incorporate traditional Egyptian materials and natural resources derived from my surroundings into my work. I was assigned a studio assistant, Mido, a polite, lanky, eager to please streak of a kid who was an art student at the nearby Luxor Art Institute. It was Mido's job to acquire all the materials I needed. The first task I set the hapless boy was to find me some lengths of palm tree trunk. The next morning I woke to the sound of my name being called from outside. It was coming from the direction of the Nile and I quickly dressed and ran to the riverbank. There was Mido in a wooden boat proudly standing astride, like he'd just hunted and shot an African wilder beast, a big hunk of palm tree. We lugged it ashore and I asked him to bring a saw and cut off a few slices for me. He returned not with a saw but with a bread knife and proceeded to hack through the tough and stringy trunk with the flimsy kitchen utensil. It took him hours dripping sweat in the hot sun to complete his assignment but by the end of the day I had the beginnings of an art work. Some days Mido would bring a group of art student friends with him and the curious young people would stand around my work table and watch me work. The international artists had been given a tour of the Art Institute where they studied and we'd been shocked by the lack of facilities and resources especially when we considered how much money had gone into the funding of our Symposium .

My next request was for some slabs of limestone. The kind that was used to line the facades of the Pyramids. Mido came through with the goods and delivered three beautifully irregular squares of the stone to my studio. I set about carving the soft surfaces with tools I borrowed from the Art Institute. I found some sheets of papyrus on a visit to the local market and integrated them into my work. Finally I asked Mido to buy me some rolls of cheese cloth bandages so I could make a 'Mummy' painting. The binding factor in all the work I produced during that two weeks in Luxor was the Ancient Egyptian medium, encaustic and I applied the melted beeswax with reverence and respect for the artists of old. At the exhibition I thanked Mido for his hard work and resourcefulness. He was very happy that I'd been so pleased with his efforts and we both knew I couldn't have done what I did without him.



 

 

 

THE ARRIVAL - An Artist In Egypt

Buildings, Cairo

Excerpt from 'They Call Him Light' by Katherine Boland

'You are in my eyes', he whispered as breathlessly I collapsed into his arms.
 

I guessed what they meant but in the dim light of his unadorned apartment with the call to prayer filtering through the dusty wooden shutters, I asked him to interpret his exotic words of love in order to savour them a little and relish the unfamiliar sound of English spoken with an Egyptian accent.

‘It means that I see the world through you and whatever I do, wherever I go I have you in my mind', he explained earnestly as he smothered the palm of my hand with soft kisses.

I thought so', I said smiling secretly and deliciously to myself beneath the covers.

It was late in 2010, just prior to Egyptian Revolution, when I flew into Cairo for the first time. Egypt had never been somewhere I'd particularly wanted to visit. Mostly I'd gravitated towards Europe - to France, Italy or Spain. I wasn't that interested in Ancient Egypt or the Pyramids, perhaps because I found the whole Pharaoh thing rather sickening. It seemed to me that the reign of the Sun Gods produced a huge amount of human suffering and for what? The veneration of a bunch of deluded megalomaniacs? I knew nothing about Islam or Egypt's political situation or culture. Apart from as a teenager idolising the seventies pop star Cat Stevens, who bafflingly and devastatingly for his fans and for me in particular, as I'd had my heart set on marrying him, ditched his career at its peak to become Jusuf Islam, I’d never had any connection with a Muslim. Then out of nowhere the Egyptian Ministry of Culture invited me to an all expenses paid International Artists Symposium in Luxor, Egypt. It was an offer too good to refuse and I accepted the invitation even though it meant undertaking another arduous long haul flight so soon after returning home to Australia from an artist's residency in France.

An artist's life can be interesting, unconventional, unpredictable and at times a bit scary, financially that is. There's no regular weekly wage coming in and it's either feast (when you sell paintings) or famine (when you don't sell any paintings). A report by The Australian Arts Council claims there's a 98% attrition rate amongst artists and only 0.004% of them make a decent living. On the plus side being an artist allows you to do something you love. You're not condemned or confined to an office or a factory floor or even to a country which means you can work wherever in the world you choose.

 

'Why don't you get a job you hate like everyone else!' my cautious, conservative, insured to the hilt, Sign of The Goat daughter says whenever I become anxious about money.

 

But I'd made a choice a long time ago to pursue a career in art. When I was quite young it dawned on me that one day I would grow up and have to work. What a terrifying prospect I thought, maybe not in those words but certainly with that sentiment. I looked at my parent's dreary working lives, running a small business in a big country town in rural Victoria. The idea of spending my life doing something eight hours a day five days a week I didn't like filled me with dread. But at school I'd become completely engrossed when a teacher assigned us interesting projects to do such as making coffee stained treasure maps with burned edges or the head of a zebra with Clag drenched strips of newspaper plastered onto an inflated balloon and I knew without a doubt that creating things was the only thing worth doing.

 

At Christmas I'd fashion decorations from silver foil and glitter to hang on the tree and at Easter I'd collect the still warmish eggs from the chooks and paint intricate designs on their blown out shells with pretty crimson cochineal. Weekends and school holidays I'd drive my mother crazy coming up with a fantastical ideas that were way beyond my abilities and pester her until she'd agree to help me realise my dazzling visions. When we were bored my  sister and I would black out the long passageway in the centre of the house and back light our heads with candle light to trace the outlines of our silhouettes on the sheets of butchers paper we'd sticky taped to the door at the end of the hall. Peace would descend on the house hold as we spent a fight free afternoon colouring in the crudely drawn profiles with black Indian ink and my mother would breath a sigh of relief and go and put her feet up.
 

Rainy Sundays were reserved for upturning the sewing basket and constructing whole cities out of cotton reels, buttons, a pack of playing cards and domino tiles. When that ended in tears, as it always did, Mum, to get some peace, would allow us to use felt pens to draw intricate weather maps on the lounge room window and we'd take it in turns to be The Weather Girl from the Bureau of Meteorology on the ABC, expressively pointing out the concentric rings of high or low pressure with a knitting needle and well rounded vowels. Hours could be filled hunched over the kitchen table designing groovy outfits in an oversized sketch pad - culottes, hot pants and mini-skirts, whatever I'd seen featured in the fashion pages of Dolly Magazine that month. I'd cut out the fragile designs with meticulous precision using Mum's precious green scissors and hang the ensembles on my cardboard manikin with their tiny paper shoulder tabs. So as you can imagine, many years later, when my portfolio and application to study Graphic Art and Design at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was accepted I was at the same time overjoyed and relieved.

I have to say that from the air the Cairo looked bleak. Dust encrusted concrete cubicles with fields of satellite dishes disappeared in the distance, swallowed up by a dirty brown haze of pollutants. It was like someone had taken a huge flour sifter of beige self raising flour to the place or like one of my childhood finger paintings where the colours would turn to mud if I mucked around with it too much. The only appealing landmarks I could see through the mire were the mosques with their elegant white minarets and perfect domes. To my unaccustomed Western eyes, much more accustomed to flying in over rolling and picturesque expanses of green, where glistening rivers twist through craggy, tree covered mountain ranges with interesting little villages perched on high, it appeared inhospitable, almost uninhabitable. I tried to picture what it would be like living in one of those apartment blocks, driving on those roads and walking in those streets. It seemed like one apocalyptic sandstorm would bury the whole city alive. Perhaps a hundred years from now there'd be nothing but a sea of those satellite dishes poking through the desert sand like huge metallic seashells. I squinted to see the Pyramids but couldn't make them out in the gritty atmosphere. 

 

Down there, somewhere in that sprawling mass of mankind and masonry, he was there, like an insignificant grain of sand in the vast desert. I didn't know he existed then. I wouldn’t meet him until I arrived in Luxor in a few days time. But events were conspiring and had been since well before he gently pushed his way into the world only twenty-six years ago.

'I will tell you something', he announced in the early days of our union.

 

It was my first taste of his legendary and endearing introductions.

 

'My birth was painless for my mother', he declared.

 

I immediately thought of the painless birth of the Buddha, supposedly born from his mother’s side. 

 

'She felt almost nothing and looked down amazed to see me lying there beside her’, he added proudly.

 

'Like a little ray of Light', I teased.

She had called him Nour, meaning Light in Arabic. Just one of the ninety-nine names for Allah.

Then the plane banked and I saw it …the mighty Nile. And my heart raced as we hit the runway and taxied into Cairo International Airport.