Creative space

ARTISTIC LIVES:Katherine Boucher Beug syas she always wanted to work in isolation, so carving out a home in the wilds of west Cork has been an experience to treasure, she tells GEMMA TIPTON

’IVE JUST THOUGHT of my best Irish story,” says Katherine Boucher Beug, adding another tale to the sunny afternoon’s tally. We are sitting in her gorgeous garden, on a hill above the Bandon river, with the hum of bees in the background, sipping tea made with just-picked mint and eating cake. “It was the summer of 1966, and I was 19.”

Boucher Beug had come to Ireland from the US, but the friend she was travelling with left, and then Katherine was fired from the BB where she was chamber-maiding, so she made her way down to Kinsale. “The reason I was in Ireland was I wanted to be a poet, and that was because I had fallen in love with Yeats.”

While walking along the Scilly Road into town one day, she says: “This woman in an old dilapidated estate car drives up beside me, and stops and rolls down the window and says, ‘You look interesting, get in.’ I have no recollection of looking interesting, but certainly no one had ever said that to me before.”

The woman in the car was Hedli Anderson, the widow of poet Louis MacNeice. “She said, ‘what do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘I want to be a poet,’ and she said, ‘That’s fine, you can come and work in the restaurant, there’s some other poets there.’” The restaurant was The Spinnaker and the other poets were Macdara Woods and Timothy Brownlow; Anderson and Boucher Beug became lifelong friends.

Boucher Beug became an artist instead of a poet, and in a life patterned with luck and coincidence, she met her German husband, Joachim Beug, at university in Chicago. She is tall and willowy, with a mass of cloudy hair, and he is white-haired and tanned from working in the garden. They amiably disagree as to whether it was love at first sight: Boucher Beug says it was, her husband declares that “it wasn’t that simple”. But marry they did, and following two years in Hamburg, the couple found themselves back in west Cork, when Beug was offered a job in the German department at UCC.

Now, almost 40 years later, we’re in this beautiful garden, and we’re just about to go into her studio to see the paintings that are at last ready for her forthcoming exhibition in Dublin. “Sometimes I do look around and think, it’s so beautiful, how on earth did I get here?” Boucher Beug muses.

It wasn’t always easy. They found the house in 1973. “We fell in love with the place when we saw it,” Beug remembers. “I saw the big chestnut tree, and the idea of owning a place with a chestnut tree just did it to me. The house also had real atmosphere.” Butter was made in this former farmhouse in the 18th century, when the Cork Butter Exchange was the largest butter market in the world, and quoted on the London stock exchange. “We just did it up. But at first we got really bad builders, who made it worse. We had a ‘gentleman plumber’. He rode horses and ‘for a lark’ he did plumbing.”

How difficult was it for an American and a German to set up home in the wilds of west Cork in 1970s Ireland? Germans and Americans are more “direct”, says Beug, describing faculty meetings at UCC in the early days. “I would sit there for half an hour, with a heated debate going on, and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what the issue was. Because the issue never came out.

“My work has evolved here,” she says. “When we came here, we had one baby, and I was pregnant with the next one, and working, and teaching . . . and we didn’t know anybody. It was very lonely at the beginning. There are so many wonderful things about our life now, but it was quite a lonely journey. We had no friends, we had no family. We got to know people through the university, and then people like Maud [Cotter, the sculptor] and Vivienne [Roche, the visual artist].”

Boucher Beug met the pair when teaching at the Crawford College of Art and Design, a job she talked herself into while lining up to register as a student. She was young and full of iconoclastic energy, bringing ideas such as Josef Albers’ colour theory to Cork. Her students at the time remember her with fondness and gratitude, but the job didn’t last long: at a staff meeting, with that American directness, she announced that “there are several incompetent teachers here”, which obviously didn’t go down too well with the permanent members of staff. This may sound as if Boucher Beug is aggressive or difficult; in fact, she’s very gentle, but is passionate about the things she loves, and it’s exciting to be in her company. You come away inspired with ideas and energy to take on bigger, more difficult things.

From our talk about national characteristics, we move on to the topic of bees. Joachim Beug keeps hives at the end of the garden, from which he gets pots of honey, which he gives to family and friends. “We get invited to dinner a lot,” he says. It seems that Irish bees are more belligerent than German bees, while Austrian and Hungarian bees are the most relaxed and agreeable of all, although, Beug adds, “there are tall stories about bees, don’t believe everything you hear”. Is he worried about the stories of declining bee populations? “My bee man here, who is my mentor, says they’re much older than mankind; they will, sooner or later, find some way of coping.”

We leave the bees and go over to Boucher Beug’s studio, in a converted courtyard shed. It has that contained sense of order meeting the chaos of creativity, that so many artists find the best backdrop for making work. There are notes, photographs, older work, and sketches for new ideas stuck to the walls, and reading a story through the images, I can see that, while she moves from subject to subject, and theme to theme, there are elements that remain. Figures come and go; a ladder develops into a grid, then the grid breaks down a little and becomes more about colour and tone. It’s a fascinating place. “I always wanted to be isolated,” she says. “I never doubted that, never doubted this place.”

Her own fiercest critic, Boucher Beug recently destroyed two years’ worth of canvases. “It took me a while to figure out it wasn’t working. Now I feel it is working again. How am I to know?” she smiles ruefully. “I don’t know what I am doing until at least two to three years after I’ve done it.”

Colour theory has also crept into the garden, where Beug tells me his wife “treats it like a canvas”. Whatever the approach, it works. Like the garden, her drawings and paintings just feel right – special and right.

Katherine Boucher Beug's exhibition Some Timeis at the Oliver Sears Gallery on Molesworth Street, Dublin 2, from June 23 to July 29. oliversearsgallery.com, katherineboucherbeug.com