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.