Centenarian's art doubles as visual diary

Alice de Boton relaxes and swaps anecdotes with her daughter, Aline Kultgen, in the living room of her third-floor apartment at The Terrace Retirement Community, where for more than a decade she has risen each morning and worked tirelessly on her art. A dozen or so portraits and landscapes line the walls, a small sample of the art that has earned her an international reputation.

De Boton turns 100 on Christmas Day. The Terrace, where de Boton moved in 1993 after the death of her husband, Robert, invited relatives and friends to celebrate the milestone Friday and to view some of her art.

Even as she nears 100, painting remains de Boton’s passion. She loves vivid colors, and she’s become an expert at encaustic painting, an ancient technique dating to the fifth century B.C., when beeswax was used for practical and artistic purposes. The encaustic method employs a mixture of pigment and molten beeswax that has to be heated before it can be applied to a painting surface, usually prepared wood. The artist then passes a heating element over the color until the individual brush or palette marks fuse into a uniform film.

In Greek, encaustic means “burning in.” The method was used by ancient Greeks to decorate ships and to create icons. The Egyptians also used encaustic painting to do mummy portraits.

Although de Boton concedes the method can pose great challenges, she appreciates the colors, texture and luminosity it produces.

“I just like it,” de Boton said. “It appealed to me, and I started to experiment with it, and over the past 25 years, I developed new techniques.”

De Boton says she is one of a few encaustic painters in Columbia today. Karsten Ewald, interim director of the Columbia Art League, agrees.

“It’s a very involving process,” he said. “It is not an instant process, and it takes time to complete. I think lots of younger artists don’t have the patience to deal with it.”

De Boton has had numerous exhibits in U.S. museums and galleries and received multiple awards, including the degree of honor from the San Francisco-based Society of Western Artists. She is a member of many art associations, and her encaustic paintings can be found in many private collections in the United States, Mexico and Israel.

“My mom is quite something,” Kultgen said.

De Boton has also had several solo exhibits at the Terrace and at local galleries. Some of her work is on display at the Columbia Art League now. And the entire third-floor west wall of the retirement home is devoted to her paintings.

“Residents and visitors of The Terrace appreciate viewing Alice’s artwork in the hallway where she lives,” said Ginny Edgar, marketing director of The Terrace. “I enjoy seeing her encaustic paintings for the uniqueness of the vivid flowing colors. Alice is so varied in the type of paintings she does. She has such wonderful abilities to do paintings about social issues” as well as “landscapes and portraits.”

De Boton thinks of her paintings as a kind of visual diary, a way for her to search for better understanding of her thoughts and feelings. It is that expressive nature, and her tenacity as an artist, that has made admirers of people such as Ewald.

“I really love it,” Ewald said. “She has a great sense of color, and her artwork is very expressive and emotionally charged. I think it’s just wonderful that she is 100 years old and still doing it. She is an inspiration to all artists.”

Born in Jaffa, Palestine, before Israel’s statehood, de Boton’s introduction to art began during her childhood when she started using a box of paints someone had given her sister, Marguerite. She spent her early years in Palestine and Egypt, then her family relocated to France, where she started looking for an opportunity to study art. But relatives and friends discouraged her, arguing art would not be lucrative.

“No one thought highly of arts, so I studied chemistry,” she said.

Her ambitions were also cut short by World War II. “When the Germans invaded France, everyone left Paris,” she said. “We ended up in Marseille for a year and later on a farm. I was too preoccupied by the war to paint.”

Her brother, Yves, was arrested, jailed and killed by the Germans, she said. After the war, her family decided to immigrate to the United States. They boarded a liberty boat in Belgium and headed for Houston in 1947.

They later moved to California, where de Boton saw an opportunity to nurture her talent. She opened a school of fine arts in San Mateo, Calif., where she worked with several renowned artists. She sold the school in 1957 and moved to Berkeley, Calif., to open her own gallery. Later the de Botons went to Mexico and, finally, they came to Columbia to settle down.

Still, de Boton thinks of her homeland and keeps in touch with her relatives in Israel. She longs for peace in the region. Painting remains an important outlet for her emotions.

“My artwork has been shaped by my immigrant experience,” she said, “as well as by my sense of social justice.”