T
he magical, mystical, multi-faceted Martyn Thompson is taking
breakfast in a Collingwood cafe and recounting how he came to own
a garden in the Catskills wilds of upstate New York. Divulging its
charms from the long distance of Melbourne, where the National
Gallery of Victoria recently invited him to compete in their triennial
Rigg Design prize, the expat Aussie photographer effuses about the “openness”
of Australia’s southern city and his want to spend more time working there. This
desire, explains Thompson — who is famous for investing imagery and interiors
with an emotional resonance — is both a function of his age and lack of family
moorings in Manhattan, where he has lived for the last two decades.
“New York started drumming into me that it was not my place,” he says.
“Suddenly, I didn’t feel rooted in anything. I was grinding away in a city with
a changing culture I wasn’t relating to anymore and wondering why.”
Speaking with a weariness that belies his workaholic nature, Thompson
informs that his antidote to this alienation was to take the two-and-a-half-hour
bus trip from New York City to visit friends in Woodstock. It is the mountain
enclave made legend in 1969, when it hosted three days of peace and music,
marketed as An Aquarius Exposition.
“There was something about this town that reminded me of Barlaston, the
little village near Stoke-on-Trent in England, where my grandparents lived in a
black-tarred house,” says London-born Thompson. “I think I was searching
for some deeper connection and could feel it in this place; a deeply earthedspot where billionaires and blue-collar
workers shared hippie sympathies.”
Idealising himself as a commune dweller
subsisting on the toil of soil, Thompson
recalls doing the rounds of co-op-type
properties with a real estate agent who
advised that winter snows made it tough to
plough out in certain parts. “But I don’t even
drive,” he says in shrill repeat of his response
to the agent’s remark. “I asked if a taxi could
get me out, to which she politely replied that
we should look at something closer to town.”
Laughing at his naivety, Thompson says
that he was then returned to the village and
toured through the home of an artist —
a century-old abode with ramshackle plan,
proportions and ceiling pitches and a garden
in which wild nature had trumped the
conceit of man. “Within three days I had
signed the contract of sale.”
On possession of the property, Thompson
blacked out the building’s exterior with
Barlaston-like pitch and dissolved the
rambling interiors in Farrow & Ball’s Pigeon
grey paint. He also laid a ring of logs around
the garden’s rotunda (a Renaissance relic
from Italy), to contain the wild growth. But
for one who affects the air of a woodland
satyr, this circle pulses with the magic of
pagan ceremony — the sort that might
sacrifice a virgin under a blood red moon.
“Oh, you won’t find any in Woodstock,”
roars Thompson, reminding that these are
Summer of Love lands. He is seeking a sense
of nature ringed with myths in creaking
canopies of trees that open, grow and fade
over beds of Black-eyed Susan, peony and
weed — “all with their own charm”. But he
concedes little knowledge of horticulture,
admitting that he shoulder-tapped an
ex-boyfriend’s botanically savvy mother,
Maureen Drury, to instruct in the ‘why’ of plants.
“Within one season they were flourishing,” he says.
“It was absolutely amazing to observe that first cycle
of nature, the way plants willfully transport
themselves and regenerate regardless of the
best-laid plans. In the three years that I’ve had the
garden, I’ve lost all fear of dying.”
Luxuriating in the therapeutic properties of his
patch — a quality he is keen to explore in wider work
— Thompson extended his house into a wire-veiled
outdoor room for deeper immersion in landscape.
“It is where I take photos, where I eat and where
I think,” he says of its sanctuary. “I am there a lot,
sitting, working, looking, centering and drawing
emotional comfort.”
As a self-declared Aquarian, living in the Age
of Aquarius in a patch that famously staged the
Aquarius Exposition nearly 50 years ago, Thompson
thrills to the astrological rightness of it all. “It was
written in the stars.” VL
martynthompsonstudio.com
@martynthompsonstudio70 vogueliving.com.au
Thompson outside his
multi-purpose Woodstock studio.VLife