Olive Trees Gaucin Andalucia

Bright warm branches cut against a shining silk sky.

Red Olive Tree.

Its early morning in late January and the air is warm. Over head the sky is a wonderful clear pale blue with streaks of soft white cirrus up higher than the limestone crags that steeply rise above the road on my left.
Further to my left the valley continues to fall quickly through oak trees far down to a river

Work in mixed media on paper

below which sparkles in the sun. The Phoenicians had camped down there and later the Romans, later still the bandits and British buccaneers from Gibraltar.
To my front is a series of hairpin bends and more crags. There is supposed to be a village here on the map, we should be there but I can’t hear or see it. On my right is a steep slope and olive trees are growing in lines, old and gnarled they cling to the soil and stones, beyond them another craggy mountain and another disappearing in a developing haze. I can see a buzzard circling, or is it an eagle. Barbara joins me and we sit down and peel the fresh orange that she took from a lone orange tree by the road side, its juice is sweet, warm and tasty. Sitting still we share the fruit and listen to the silence of nature.
Dropping below us is ridge after ridge of cork oak, the ridges drop one after the other. They have a colour graduation that runs from red purple to the deepest mauve. In the distance I can see the blue sugar loaf of Gibraltar –Jebel Tariq as the moors called it and fainter still in the distance the summit of Jebel Musa its twin across the straights of Morocco.

It’s our second day in Andalucía. We have just stopped the small hire car at a lay-by. The road we have travelled on from Casares, a town named after the Roman Caesar Julius, is steep and damaged in many places. On the other side of the road from the car park the steep bank is full of tall cactus and a lush variety of vivid wild plants. They are quite beautiful I recognise some of them from home, but here they are larger and brighter and grow in profusion. Not being a botanist I’ve no idea of their name, Ox eyed daisy maybe, or cowslip. My interests tend to be in what they look like and the shape of them as they grow. I get out my sketch book and camera, and quickly make some drawings and take some photographs. There is a profusion of good images around me but what I’m drawn to most of all is the trees and the steep stony ground. I had seen Olive Trees like these in Cyprus a couple of years ago. Then the images of Olive trees appearing out of a heat haze could have been lifted from some of the books on the Holy land that I had studied at St Mary’s R.C College. The Olive grove before us now, on this steep mountain side should be an illustration of the Garden where the Christ prayed in occupied Judea.

The sun was getting hotter, the ground dry and stony and the Olive trees in their winter vestments looked gnarled and windswept. While I worked on my drawings I was remembering the stories of Englishmen fighting for both Fascists and Communists in the 1930’s. The Spanish civil war began in the hillside town that we had driven passed half an hour ago. There is a roadside memorial near there to a group of murdered communists. Christy Moor’s song on the role of the Irish Holy Roman Catholic church in the Spanish civil war had since then, and still was running relentlessly through my head. “ Viva la Quinta brigade”, the pastor and the peasant side by side; Avanti was the cry upon the hillside as below the Spanish sun they fought and died”. I realised that though this was a landscape I was actually thinking about 2000 years of war and faith. No wonder Andalucía's Picasso created Guernica and that we are still drawn to icons and symbols of peace. What will we draw for Iraq, or for Tibet?
I wrote in my notes next to my sketches, “The Olive trees would have to presented as icons, silent witnesses to change, cared for, and harvested, their branches reaching forwards, a sign of movement and peace. The olive, their fruit, a source of sustenance. In this way they should be painted with the marks visible, pencil, charcoal, graphite, ink, each mark leaving a visible path, the paint would need to be applied over this as a veil, thinly, spattered and scratched into like the old Catholic icons which are varnished with a satin sheen”.


Rob miller arts journal formative works
Ascot studios Ribchester . www.ascotstudos.com www.robmiller.eu