MARTYN THOMPSON
The Australian photographer trades the bustle of Manhattan for Woodstock
The 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 earthed spot 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.”