Last weekend, we spent a damp but utterly undreary weekend wandering through North Adelaide, dodging the odd shower, exploring blue plaques on the front gates of 19th century and early 20th century homes, dipping into quirky coffee shops, strolling along tiny back streets, peeking into a basketful of churches, some converted into art galleries.
Then we came across an art gallery at the western end of Melbourne Street – not in a church – that houses The David Roche Collection. David J Roche AM (1930–2013), collected art for almost sixty years and includes paintings, furniture, sculptures, ceramics, and clocks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1999 he established the David Roche Foundation to house and preserve his collection for future generations, at Fermoy House.
This year, the gallery is also hosting a magnificent Arthur Boyd exhibition: The Life of Saint Francis. The poster caught my eye as we walked down Melbourne Street, bringing up memories of Boyd’s tapestry of trees in Parliament House in Canberra. Commissioned in 1983 for the new Parliament House, it was completed in 1988. Boyd painted a bush scene in the Shoalhaven River area in southern New South Wales, from which the weavers designed a vast tapestry. Nine metres high and almost twenty metres wide, it is awe inspiring. I remember gazing rapturously upon the stand of enormous eucalypts that took fourteen weavers two years to create.
More recently, I became reacquainted with Arthur Boyd through a sketch that belongs to our Lyceum Club, which depicts St Francis blowing one of his companions, Brother Masseo, into the air. And, as it turns out, this sketch is part of his Saint Francis series. Boyd’s tapestry of the scene shows the two naked men, stripped of worldly accoutrements, floating heavenwards.
For my non-Australian readers, Arthur Boyd was an Australian artist from an overly achieving family of artists. His grandfather, parents, brother, wife, and children have all painted. Boyd himself, was a painter, potter and printmaker. The Art Gallery of New South Wales describes him thus:
He painted lyrical and emotive allegories on universal themes of love, loss and shame, often located in the Australian bush… Boyd had a strong social conscience, and his paintings engage deeply with humanitarian issues.
Despite spending a dozen years in London, Boyd often painted Australian landscapes. But he also drew heavily on mythology and religion, and this is apparent in this unusual exhibition in North Adelaide. Borrowed from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the exhibition consists of a selection of rarely seen tapestries, lithographs, pastels, and sketches depicting the life of Saint Francis of Assis. In 1975, Boyd left more than 2000 works of art to the NGA and the people of Australia. That same year, the NGA acquired the St Francis tapestries at cost price.
This particular series arose from a trip to Assisi and Gubbio in Italy in 1964. Arthur Boyd created a plethora of drawings in crayon and ink, to capture his initial ideas about St Francis and the stories that particularly piqued his imagination. The drawings became paintings in pastel, and the paintings were used to design twenty tapestries at the Tapeçarias de Portalegre atelier in Portugal. Under Boyd’s direction, weavers then created the St Francis suite over four years.
Each tapestry is 2.5 x 3 metres – and I am looking at my own 2×3 m rugs as I write this and comparing the large wall space needed to hang even one of these stunning creations. According to the gallery notes, there are 2500 stitches per square metre – which is beyond my capacity to imagine – and the collection ‘explores the universal human conditions of love and pain, sacrifice, and compassion through the artist’s highly original interpretation of the legend of the medieval Italian saint.’
The St Francis lithographic suite (25 editions of 21 lithographs) is deceptively simple, the contrast between black and white reflecting the constant battle between good and evil in the life of St Francis. But the vast tapestries – copied from Boyd’s pastel illustrations for Tom Boase’s book about St Francis – use strong, rich colours. Gold, red, orange and splashes of bright blue ‘illustrate… the fire of faith burning bright, a theme that explicitly infuses the legends of St Francis.’
The tapestries are huge, and I was enthralled by the range of the colours used when I peer closely. There is a huge temptation to run ones fingers over the vibrant threads, but I obediently follow instructions and, if somewhat regretfully, kept my hands firmly behind my back.
These glorious tapestries have rarely seen the light of day. In 2009, they escaped briefly from the vaults of National Gallery of Australia, where they had been stored for over thirty years, to be exhibited at the Newman College chapel at Melbourne University. Presumably they went back into the vaults after their short burst of freedom. Until now. Only eight would fit in the wee Newman College chapel. At Fitzroy House, it is possible to immerse oneself in twelve of them, as well as a selection of the drawings, pastels and lithographs from Boyd’s series on St Francis.
The tapestries tell the story of the wealthy childhood of St Francis and his subsequent rejection of his family and a lavish lifestyle, in order to live in poverty as an itinerant preacher. In the past, he has been painted dressed in the simple robes of the Franciscan friar. Boyd mostly draws him naked, often continuing to struggle against temptations of the mind, body and spirit.
Of the dozen on display, I had three or four favourites, and as is my wont, preferred those using the strongest colours. In the tapestry entitled St Francis being beaten by his father, Boyd uses vibrant colours to reflect the heightened emotion in the scene, as St Francis’ father attempts to force his wayward son into submission. Infuriated by his son’s desire to join the church, the father imprisons Francis and beats him. In this tapestry, the father is clothed in deep red, leaning over his son in rage, a long stick in his hand, his hair streaming behind him (Boyd uses hair a lot to portray emotion), while Francis cowers at his feet. The stick divides the figures of father and son and points up to the family gold glittering in the arched window above them, illustrating the father’s love of material possessions above the love of his son and the church. It is the moment when all familial bonds were severed between father and son.
The tapestries are incredibly moving, and the colours used – red, gold, white, black and blue – have special religious significance: black for sin, darkness and death; white for purity, kindness and repentance; red for judgement or Christ’s blood; blue to represent mercy and the spirit of baptism; green for the cycle of life and resurrection, and gold or amber for the glory of God and eternal life. And suddenly, the meaning behind the images go even deeper…