AT HOME Painter Eva Schultz has struck the right creative balance – now all that’s missing is the yurt
Painter Eva Schultz has struck the right creative balance – now all that’s missing is the yurt
When it comes to her home, Eva Schultz calls herself a “nomadic” spirit. “I haven’t stayed in a house longer than two years,” the Tasmanian painter says. “I’m hoping to change that. I really like this place.” Schultz moved into her inner-city apartment with her son Julian, 14, eight months ago and works at a shared studio less than a block from her home.
“I like being so close to my studio,” she says, especially in the evenings when she can return there to focus on her work. Painting in the evenings, she says, provides “a different mental space and it’s very conducive to painting”.
Originally from Brisbane, Schultz visited Tasmania with a friend before moving to the state 10 years ago. “I was looking for somewhere to go to,” she says. “I was moving house all the time, anywhere, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go somewhere really nice’.”
Unable to concentrate in the tropical heat and struggling to navigate Brisbane’s sprawling art scene, Schultz moved to Hobart for a fresh start. Schultz says her surroundings are more beneficial for her mind than artistic inspiration.
“It’s exceptionally beautiful,” she says. “I’m selfish about where I live. I’m visually stimulated, but I don’t use it in my work.”
That said, when she first moved to the state and lived in South Hobart on the base of kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Schultz was inspired to paint a series of clouds based on those looming above her home. “The sky looked like it was sucking the clouds up into itself,” she says. “My son and I were gawking at the sky and taking so many photos.”
She now likes to keep her cloudscapes in her bedroom. Schultz has many other works of art around the house. In the stairwell of her two-storey home, which is tucked away behind and above a city shop, hangs the first painting she ever did. Still unfinished and unnamed, the acrylic was started when Schultz was 19 and depicts a woman’s face and arms engulfed in darkness. Another nearby painting, called Dissolution, shows enlarged rat’s bones.
Schultz started art when she was a young girl, with dreams to sculpt and draw. “Kids draw, but I drew a lot,” she remembers. “I drew at school when I should have been working.”
She says it was harder to indulge her passion at home because her mother didn’t like mess it created, with Schultz and her two elder sisters getting bits stuck in the carpet.
“Even Lego and clay, she hated the little bits she’d step on... I collect those things to sculpt with now,” she says.
A clay pot Schultz sculpted in the ‘90s during studies at TAFE sits in her lounge room, peacock feathers bursting out of the top, its spiky sides looking like the skin of an amphibious beast.
Still sculpting, though not commercially, Schultz’s specialty is now painting.
The paintings in her latest exhibition, Threshold, are wild – even to Schultz, who admits she can’t always understand them until she talks about them later.
“Would it make sense to suggest that there are levels of your mind or consciousness that you can access quite freely [without] necessarily understand what you’re drawing from it?
“Sometimes I’m blown away by what someone gleans from something that I was on a totally different track about. People’s interpretation is a funny thing.”
With intense colour, Schultz paints people and animals in fantasy-like settings inspired by her dreams. Though women are often the central subject to her paintings, Schultz says, “as a child, I had trouble understanding people. I think this helps me, but it’s going to be a long road”.
She suspects the birds in her works, including those flocking around a standing woman in The Augur, may come from memories of her mother, who bred up to 120 budgies.
At 12, Schultz also kept a wild galah as a pet until her father set it free.
“It had traits of having been kept and it was a bit twitchy,” she says. “It seemed a little bit mad – it used to swear. It was a fantastic bird and I had it in an aviary with a guinea pig, and there were field mice that came up through the floor. They all kind of lived happily in the aviary.”
Schultz’s parents have both moved to Tasmania, too. On her father’s block of land in Franklin, Schultz had plans to build a yurt inspired by her travels to Mongolia with a friend in 2009. Her father cleared a space of land, but the parts of the yurt are still in storage under Schultz’s home.
She keeps two colourful and hand-painted support poles in the house, set up against the loungeroom wall to “deliberately
add some kind of suggestion something happens” – for now, they are acting as a makeshift television screen for when she projects films onto the wall.
Its wooden beams match an old-style cupboard and a wooden mantelpiece. On her coffee table, she keeps a piece of driftwood with space for tea lights carved into it – a gift she bought for her partner from local craftsman at the nearby Brunacci Avalon Market.
Though it’s her first time living in the middle of the city, Schultz makes productive use of her limited space and grows tomatoes, gooseberries, blueberries and herbs – along with ferns in and around the home.
She also takes care of cat Hedgehog, who lives in harmony with the many fish in a tank installed in the renovated kitchen.
Though she can’t put an exact age on the house, she’s impressed with its pressed-tin ceilings – a feature common in heritage homes.
Schultz doesn’t dare reveal what’s beyond the doors of teenage son’s bedroom – but isn’t afraid to declare her pride in his artistic talent. “He really likes constructing fantastical machines,” she says. “He does a lot of them on his computer – and they always look like they’re going to work!”
See Eva Schultz’s exhibition Threshold at the Despard Gallery, 15 Castray Esp, Hobart, until Monday, April 13. Turn to page 20 for Tas-Weekend art critic Clyde Selby’s review of Threshold
I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMEWHERE TO GO TO. I WAS MOVING HOUSE ALL THE TIME, ANYWHERE, AND I THOUGHT, I’LL JUST GO SOMEWHERE REALLY NICE