David Boyd reminisces about Doris and her Art
* * * * September 2003 * * * *


David Boyd at St Peters in 1997 **

"As a general rule, my recollection of Doris in a creative way is of her decorating pottery, doing her own modeling, and painting. She painted a lot in the brown room. I can remember coming home from school and she would be seated with a watercolour pad on her lap under the brown room skylight, or at the brown room table. She was flexible. She could put whatever she was doing aside because her first priority was the well-being of her children.

She did many oil and watercolours paintings. In her day it was common practice for painters to go out with a sketchbook and pencil and make sketches with notes of the colours and tones, and later on paint the picture. Doris was constantly doing that. She'd often sit in the Murrumbeena garden and sketch or paint.

Sometimes sketching parties would be organized. There'd be Granny and Grandpa Boyd, Merric and Doris, and the kids. We might drive to Rickett's Point in the Dodge. The last trip I remember was with Doris and Merric and John Perceval to a little a church in Clayton. Clayton was a pretty rural area then; just paddocks with this little church on its own.

I remember staying at Balnarring one Christmas. We rented a cottage near the sea and went there every day. Merric and Doris, Arthur and Yvonne and the Percevals were there. Doris would spend part of the day sketching, drawing and painting, and the rest was spent in the water. She loved water and would get into it under any pretext. She'd refer to the breaking waves as white horses. A lot of painting and sketching was done there. Merric was sketching and drawing all the time.

When Doris painted, she was not only painting what she saw in front of her; she was painting to capture the essence of what she saw or had seen. She could be bold and she could be delicate. Of all of the greats, she most admired Turner. He had a great influence on her. It was through Doris that I developed a great affection for Turner.

Doris decorated many of Merric's pots. Merric's job was essentially the potters' job; the firing and glazing and the technical side while she decorated. Merric would often bring pots up from the pottery, although Doris did on occasions work in the pottery. Her decoration was invariably in underglaze on unfired pots or on the biscuit ware. Then they would be glazed in a clear glaze. Often she applied colour to a pot and not necessarily anything figurative.

She was a fine technician and she took her own direction. The thing she didn't do was push herself, when many did. She wasn't ambitious in the conventional sense, though she did exhibit much more frequently in the early days. What she loved, to use her own words, was 'the creative fire in the belly'. That was the important thing to her, to use to express a love of nature and the environment.

When we were children, there were no restrictions creatively. Her belief was not to interfere in the creative process. You handed somebody the materials and let them be creative themselves. She would give us advice. If you asked a question, she would offer an input, but she never stood over you and told you what to do. Her influence on her children was more by example than anything else.

I can recall her advice when I was painting the Explorer series. They were paintings to see from a distance, so I'd prop them up, maybe in two's or three's, at the end of the garden. We would look at them from the back verandah because they carried that far. She would comment on them, always in an encouraging way. I remember her mentioning that if you applied a little yellow or Prussian Blue into the flake white, which was a common base white used in oil paintings at that time, that it would make the white appear more luminous. That was the sort of comment she'd make. She never offered a derogatory criticism of anything.

Her output was really quite prolific, but so much of it was scattered and lost."

David Boyd St Peters 2003



David Boyd with Paul Caine (left) & Colin Smith at St Peters in September 2003 *

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