Interview with Dorothy Boyer

Bridging Cultures

Dorothy Boyer is a British artist who has made her home in Jeddah for the past 11 years.  She is feisty and
passionate about her painting and at 67 years old, her life is all but slowing down.

By Bizzie Frost

 

When she wakes up in the morning, she has one objective: to paint.  By the time our interview took place in her apartment in Jeddah, I had already fallen in love with, and bought, one of her paintings of the Balad from her first solo exhibition in Jeddah, “Bridging Cultures”.  She is Scottish, from Glasgow, and by her own admission is a chatterbox: she loves to talk and has a lot to say. We settled into two comfortable armchairs, and a lively account of her life unfolded.

 

“I have always painted but my mother wouldn’t let me go to art school – she wanted me to have a proper job.”  At school, she had shown great promise and had won prizes for her paintings.  Her spare time was spent in the Glasgow art galleries, studying the work of the old masters and wondering how they achieved what they did, and wondering if she could do the same. 

Instead of following her dream, she went to Strathclyde University to train to be a primary school teacher, a course that she hated.  The day she graduated, she applied to British United Airways and became an airhostess.  As soon as she stepped into an aeroplane, she thought: “This is much more fun than teaching!”  The flights took her all over the world, and on one trip to South America, an Anglo-Argentinean gentleman in row 16A of the VC-10 caught her eye.  He had been left a 3000 acre cattle and crop “estancia” in the flat “pampa humida” area of northern Argentina, on the border of the Cordoba and Santa Fe provinces.  After they were married, Boyer joined her husband, John, on the ranch and learned about life in an isolated area where self-sufficiency was the order of the day.  “I was quite creative and inventive.  Running your own place out there was hard.  I had to learn to be a doctor and a nurse as well.”  It was then that her teacher training experience became useful, because when their son, Sandy, was born, she also had to do his schooling.    Her painting wasn’t neglected, and Boyer also became a dedicated gardener, growing flowers for her paintings.  With only herself to rely on, she developed her work through a self-taught process, painting still life pictures in oils.

By the time she was 40 years old, Boyer had had enough of her life on the isolated estancia, and the political situation in Argentina was uneasy.  They sold the ranch and returned to Scotland where Boyer still avoided her calling as a painter.  This time, she enrolled at the Inchbald School of Interior Design in London and did an intensive one-year course, and won the top prize.  During this course, students had to paint watercolour “artist impressions” of their designs for their portfolios and her painting skill was recognised by the course tutors.  “When other people – my friends – said my paintings were ‘lovely’, I just didn’t believe them.  But when the art teacher said I had this ability, I realised that I had.” 

Immediately afterwards, she spent the whole summer studying modern contemporary watercolour artists and began painting flowers in watercolours.  Two of these paintings were accepted by, and exhibited in the prestigious Mall Galleries in London.  Now confident of her talent, Boyer opened her own Interior Design business and showroom in Dove Street, London, and studied the art of the new fashionable “faux finishing” paintwork.  She became a master at the craft of reproducing marble, graining, and antique effects in oil paint, as well as the deceptive “trompe l’oeil” style of painting, little realising that it was these skills that would lead her to Saudi Arabia.

After working on several projects with a colleague that she met on the course, he asked for her assistance in decorating a house in London for Mr. Mohammed Attar, a businessman from Saudi Arabia.  It seemed fitting that it was on 14th February 1992 that she was invited to Jeddah to work on a town house for the Attar family – and her love affair with Saudi Arabia began.

Her reputation as an innovative artist soon spread around Jeddah and her phone began to ring regularly with commissions.  She then met the renowned Saudi artist Sophia Bin Zagr.  Sophia invited her to speak about her work at her Salon, and more work came her way.  As Boyer and her husband had just had a huge crisis with a business interest in the UK, this all came at the right time.

Boyer is best known in Jeddah for her paintings on the walls, ceiling and dome of the Laylity Wedding Hall.  She accepted this commission sometime before the building was even under construction and, as her brother happened to be working in Jeddah, set up a portacabin studio outside his villa.  At the time, this was the largest project of its kind in the entire Middle East, and Boyer was the only woman doing this type of work.  The task required two specific painting techniques: the first involved painting 56 murals on highly specialised Belgian mural canvas.  This oil-primed canvas arrived from the Covent Garden suppliers in huge rolls, rather like carpeting.  It then had to be cut into 56 individual panels measuring 2.2 metres by 2 metres.  The completed canvases were then taken to the site, and glued into position. 

The second technique, on the dome, involved painting directly onto the plasterwork of the dome itself.  Think Michaelangelo: Agony & Ecstasy.   The dome is 90 feet high and huge scaffolding was erected inside the nearly completed building.  However, there was no air conditioning, and the only electric light came from a single strip-light, powered by a generator.  Boyer remembers it being a solitary and totally consuming job, surviving on 5 hours sleep a night, on her feet all day, perspiring profusely from the heat, with her head bent back as she painted scenes above her.  “From the ground, you think the painting is on the ceiling, but when you are standing up there, you are in front of a section that is 15 feet high.  You only see these sections of what you are painting.  It is only when you are on the ground that you can see it in its entirety.  I would still be there at 2 in the morning, on my own, still painting.  I could think and talk of nothing else.  The pain was excruciating, but painting is like an anaesthetic.  It is like a drug, and I could work through the pain barrier.”  Boyer worked continuously for 13 months without a break, completing the project in 1996.  The result provided the best advertisement anyone could hope for and she virtually became a household name in Jeddah.

By 1996 it became clear that Boyer was staying in Jeddah, so her husband, John decided to join her and they moved into their own flat.  Unlike most expatriates, she chose not to live in a compound but instead to live in a block of flats among the Saudi community.  She dispensed with the portacabin studio and now has two very tidy studios in her flat: one for her oil painting, the other for her watercolour painting.

By this time, Sophia Bin Zagr had also persuaded Boyer to do something that she didn’t really want to do: teach painting.  She has now taught some 300 ladies in Jeddah and feels that she has introduced them to a new world and new sense of self.  “Their art allows them to be free; they are in their own private place that is unreachable and it changes their lives forever.  They understand that they will never see the world in the same way again.  I have opened their eyes to what they have, to the beauty that is around them in their own culture.  One woman wrote in my visitors’ book that I had opened her eyes to a Jeddah that she didn’t know existed.  So I think that I am meant to be here.”

In the winter months, Boyer loves to go to the Balad, the Old Town of Jeddah.  She spends hours making sketches and colour “references” with her watercolours, as well as writing notes, and mentally absorbing the details of her surroundings.  Her paintings of the old buildings demonstrate her affinity with the subtle nuances of light on the fading colours and peeling plaster.   “When I go down to the Souq, I find the colours are amazing.  When other people go there, they see dirt and dust. Perhaps I have an advantage: I see colour where people don’t normally see colour.  I have a condition called synesthesia which means that I see the days of the week in colour, and certain words in colour.  I thought everybody had it and didn’t know I was different until I was about 34!” 

Boyer has previously painted images of the Balad in oils but has recently taken to using watercolour instead.  “Watercolour is incredibly difficult and there is no room for error: it has to be right first time.  You have to be unbelievably focused when you are doing it; you are in an almost spiritual state.  You don’t expend energy; you get energy back from it.   The souq lends itself to watercolour painting because you can convey the fragility of the crumbling buildings.”  Rumours that the Balad may soon be replaced by modern tower blocks have reached Boyer so, once again, she feels a sense that she is in Jeddah for a reason and that it is her job to capture on canvas scenes that may soon be lost forever.

In her recent exhibition, Boyer included several outstanding pastel portraits.  These are done from sittings, not from photographs, and completely capture the essence of her subject.  As a viewer, you feel that a real person is looking back at you and following you around the room with their eyes.  She is reluctant to accept commissions because most people want portraits to be painted from photographs, not live sittings.

Boyer has found that since she has been in Saudi Arabia, her art has come a long way and that she has been able to develop as an individual artist.  It has been a challenge, and when paint products and finishes have not been available, she has had to learn to make her own.  Over the last few years, she has also had serious health problems with cancer, but with the help of friends, has come through it and been able to stay in Jeddah.  Her work is straightforward with no political undertones, and her aim is to paint light and joy.  “I don’t paint depression, or anger, or strife – I paint joy, something that you would like to have on your wall.”  She finds it very difficult to part with her work and likes to know that her paintings are going to good homes, and that they are appreciated.  She feels that she will never entirely leave Saudi Arabia, and her future plans are to spend around 50% of her time at her home in Spain, and 50% in Jeddah.  She is currently exploring the Islamic culture in Granada, Cordoba, Seville and Toledo and she plans future exhibitions in Jeddah relating to this concept.  “I love my painting; it is what I get up for.  I have to do it.  I have to paint.”