An Artistic Sense: Katrina Daly
Rich, sweet fragrances often envelop the artist and screen printer, Katrina Daly. A towering Magnolia grandiflora hugs the entrance to her studio, where she delicately paints blossoms and still lifes in watercolour and oils. The perfect specimens featured in Katrina’s joyful works are snipped from the cottage-style gardens she and her partner, John, cultivated around their mud brick home.
Their creek-side property is located in Napoleon Reef, a bush hamlet just outside of Bathurst in the Central West of NSW. The couple moved here in the 1990s, swapping frantic Sydney life for country solitude. Establishing a densely packed garden and living off the land was a natural pathway for Katrina, whose childhood in the southern reaches of New Zealand was attuned to nature and her parents dedication to gardening.
The artist’s passion for the natural world extends to her productive lavender field, which is harvested in the height of summer. It's like being in a sea of bees, purpleness, and perfume. It makes us feel really good, says Katrina.
Read on as Katrina kindly shares more about her artistic journey and life at Napoleon Reef.
Hi Katrina. Have you been over to the lavender field this morning?
I didnt today, but I go over most mornings around this time of year to do some hedging. I can't believe how huge the job is. It's just a small field but it's got hundreds of plants in it. We've also got a house over there, which we used to run as a bed and breakfast called Littleton, and we're preparing the property to sell. Theres an extensive garden there too, so its a lot of work.
What's the total size of your property?
The farm’s about seventy acres but around our home and studio is only two and a half. It feels like more because it’s Crown land all around us. It’s a very dramatic landscape, undeniably Australian. It’s quite hard country. When you drive up from this place up the hill, it gets very rocky and dry.
I wondered why people chose to first settle here back in the day, but all our little houses are based at the edge of the creek, and water is life – that's where it’s all happening. Not that the creek runs very well these days because there hasn’t been much rain, and everyone’s pumping from it.
Perhaps we should start back at the beginning. Where in Southern New Zealand were you born, and what was your childhood like?
My mother had to get on a seaplane to have me because we lived on Stewart Island, right at the bottom, and she had to go to mainland Invercargill to have her kids. This was back in 55. So I have to say I was born in Invercargill, and I grew up for only a little while on Stewart Island because we moved to Queenstown when I was five.
My childhood was spent running around the hills and playing on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. When it came time for me to go to high school, my parents decided to move to Invercargill. I went to a technical college there that specialised in art. I had a fantastic art teacher and he set me in the right direction. That’s where I anchored myself and thought about art as a future way of making money.
Were you drawn to a particular area of art?
Probably painting. Our teacher educated us on the history of art, and our homework was to paint the works of famous artists like Van Gogh, Klee, and so on. My teacher kept all my books to show future students because he was very impressed. I couldn’t afford to enrol in art school straight after high school, so I worked whatever jobs I could get, like fruit picking and working in an apricot cannery. I made friends with an Australian girl, and she said come over to Sydney, so I did.
What was Sydney like at that time?
It was wonderful in the early 70s. I was probably 18, and so struck by it all. Paddington had everything and it was quite bohemian and cheap. It was pretty easy to get creative jobs because so much was going on. I discovered places like the designer fashion store Daily Planet, and I ended up working for them as a screen printer for a while. Then I branched out with another designer, and I printed or hand-painted most of the clothing that we sold through our little shop, Salon One.
I started to accept commissions to paint murals for restaurants and hairdressing salons and things like that. Then I went my own way, and I started doing fabric design and film positives for a screen printing firm. I had my first exhibition in the late eighties.
Where was it? What was the theme?
It was Greek and Etruscan themes. I showed oil paintings along with screen-printed fabrics, and the exhibition was in a private home. The owner, Rosie Nice, invited someone from the Powerhouse Museum, and they bought some of the fabric for their collection. I think it was a very complex four-colour one.
Who were the artists and creatives that inspired you in those early years?
We printed a lot of Bruce Goold designs at the screen printing place where I worked, and I loved his designs. I suppose Margaret Preston inspired me from way back. Matisse. And another inspiring artist from way, way back, was Sonia Delaunay, the French painter and textile designer.
Has there been a consistent theme throughout your creative career?
Florals and nature have been my go-to subject most of the time.
Early on, it was all about applying my designs to fashion, but I moved into furnishings and upholstery fabric. My friend Rosie Nice commissioned me to do waratah and wattle fabric, which was going to be used for cushions and upholstery. She curated a show in the year 2000, called State of the Waratah, and included me in it. It was held at the Royal Botanic Gardens and SH Ervin Gallery. It was a mixed collection of artists exploring the waratah.
How often do you screen print at home?
I've been doing some screen printing on the kitchen table here. Mainly tea towels, which are quite often derived from my paintings. I did a tea towel based on a painting of an autumn garden with birds, as well as little story called Habitat, about our house featuring bits and pieces of the garden and what goes on at night when the animals come out. Lately I’ve been doing the Waratah and Wattle design again because it was so popular. Ive been making them into serviettes.
Tell me more about your painting practice.
Everything out of the garden comes into the studio and gets painted. Its very seasonal – I follow the seasons and record what's happening out there and bring them in and do watercolours.
What do you love about working with watercolours?
It’s much easier than oils because it gives instant gratification. It’s beautiful and fresh, and it has a kind of a mind of its own sometimes. You have to let it do its thing. I do the odd oil for a commission but I just really like working on paper.
Your beautiful garden seems to inspire and nurture you on so many levels! I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the process of building up the garden and cultivating the different areas of your property.
The bones were pretty much here with very old large trees and it was a little bit overgrown. Theres the Magnolia grandiflora by my studio, which is very old. We have lots of lilac and fruit trees, like quince.
We've also added gardens. My parents were great gardeners, so I sort of drew on experience and what they had taught me. I went about purchasing mainly perennials and visiting local gardens to see what grew around here.
Growing up, we always had a veggie garden to live off. Here, John and I have to share it with so many animals. It's hard going. The wallabies and kangaroos like eating everything. We got rabbits when I put the lavender in, so we chicken wired the fences. But kangaroos can still jump over and squash a lavender plant in no time. Wombats push up fences, and they also dig up the couch grass.
To rewind a little bit – what was the impetus to relocate from the city to Napoleon Reef with John?
It was the early 90s, and John and I had sort of just met. Our friends who owned this place at the time said, come out here on the weekends if you want to get away from it all. So we started to do that, and we found it got harder to return to Sydney on Sunday nights.
It was the quietness and all the native animals around, I suppose. And the simplicity of it all. Sydney can get complicated and is so expensive these days.
Our friends said, well, why don't you try living out there? And we thought we'd try it for a year and see what happens. 34 years later, we're still here.
What was the home like when you first arrived?
We bought the house from our friends when they moved out to a property near Hill End. When they first bought here, parts of the cottage were falling down, and there were hessian ceilings and dirt floors. They added ceilings and floors, rebuilt walls with mudbrick and took other walls down. When we arrived, we took down the balcony at the back and turned it into a bedroom, using more mud bricks. We added a pantry and a bathroom and built a separate studio and office off to the side.
How did you navigate the transition from the city to the country?
We started a preserving company when we first came here because we couldn’t get work. There were no screen printing firms in Bathurst. I still did fabric design for a few clients in Sydney, but I found it harder and harder to make that trip down to Sydney. John started retraining as a surveyor engineer, and we started our preserving company, which wasn't big money, of course. We were selling through little shops in the Blue Mountains, Mosman and Bathurst, and we did local markets.
Moving here reminded me of my childhood, too, because Mum always made jams out of the plums and other fruit that were around us in Queenstown. I pulled on all of those memories, I suppose, and it felt right. I did it for a few years but it is hard on your back, working over those big pots. We stopped making the jams and chutneys, but I still make the tomato sauce because there's so much demand for it.
What are some of the fragrances and scents that define your garden?
Oh, there are all sorts of wonderful scents here.
I put in a row of roses, and they're fantastic in November and December when they're flowering. I specifically plant roses that are heavily perfumed.
There’s freesias and lilacs, jonquils and bluebells. There’s the wattle and then all the wild plums, which add another sort of perfume to the air. We’ve got wild woodbine (honeysuckle) that flowers in the winter. Its magnificently perfumed and covered in birds. Around November, the philadelphus comes out – mock orange. I’ve got Daphne everywhere too.
We’ve got a couple of rows of hot pokers, and they’re just full of little honeybirds when they flower. I plant a lot for birds. They love the plums and are trying to get into my quinces at the moment, but I've got them netted.
Why did you choose to farm lavender?
We bought Littleton about 20 years ago, and there was a magnificent lavender bush there. The old guy who owned the cottage before us told me his mother planted it after plucking some from a bush when she was walking through a Victorian garden. I took cuttings and started striking them. They had no name, so I’ve called them Littleton after the property.
I grew some rows, and after a couple of years, they started to mature and look good. Thats when I started to sell the bunches locally to a florist and a food shop and at the markets. Then I started to dry it and make dry products out of it.
Lavender has really lovely calming properties, doesn’t it?
Oh, we love picking it. It always starts around Christmas time and into January.
We get up really early and go over there, and it's like being in a sea of bees and purpleness and perfume. It makes us feel really good, and I suppose it's relaxing, too, because after a morning of picking, we usually need a siesta!
I bring baskets of it back here, and I bundle it under a big shady tree. If you're drying and preserving lavender, you've got to pick it when it's in its most perfect state. And unfortunately, that happens in the first two weeks of January when it is the hottest!
And lastly – what is your favourite Southern Wild Co scent?
I like the lemon and tea tree scent of the Aurora essential oil. It’s lovely and fresh for a morning. I add it to water in an old kettle and put it on the fire in winter. I also like the Bush Magic candle – it hits the right note for our place.
Katrina’s work and prints are available from t.arts Gallery in Bathurst or Katrina direct online. You can also find a small selection of original paintings and cards at Bank House Atelier, the home of Southern Wild Co in Rockley.
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