Cortijada Los Gazquez - Vida en 1000m. Parque Natural Sierra Maria Los Velez. Andalucia.

The day was spent looking at the canyon (cañón) on the alto plano. This is age old erosion from the plateau level where strata of sandstone being harder than the limestone are resistant to weathering. It’s a geological characteristic typical of arid zones. Many of the cliff walls are actually punctured by the remains of traditional cave houses. They are now sadly uninhabited by humans and are the reside of goats and sheep.

The bottom of this shallow canyon is more fertile and used for spring cereal crops. It’s planted in a mosaic of oblong patches declaring the ownership and fertility of specific areas of bright green spring grains. Borders are of germolene pink and khaki green Tamarix and as you look up to the canyon wall, showers of feldspar catch the sunlight and glisten.

Joya resident artist Lizzie Finn has actually been here for a few days now. She has been acclimatising, walking around our land, collecting little natural and organic objects and working on ideas.

I’ll keep you posted…

NASA’s Earth Observatory clearly illustrates the issues Los Gázquez had with flights last week. Donna was trapped in England, her flight cancelled, and had to return to Spain via Winchester, Portsmouth and a ferry to Santander, train to Madrid and train to Murcia. It took four days!

Joya resident artist Peter Morrens from Belgium, following an exhibition in Germany, had his flight cancelled too, so he used the fantastic TAXI STOP. It’s a Dutch/Belgian car sharing scheme. All you do is post you desired destination to meet up with someone with a vehicle travelling the same way. You share the cost of fuel and the driving and obviously reduce the amount of vehicles on the road. Peter Morrens got as far as Barcelona from where he took the train to Lorca (our nearest town).

Meanwhile guests at Los Gázquez, my second cousin George Beckmann and his wife Fenna, booked the train hotel from Paris to Madrid over ten months ago. They felt they should take the less frantic and environmentally more friendly train…

only to discover that there was a French rail stike and that their train had been cancelled. There only choice was to take the 14 hour overnight coach to Barcelona. They then missed their connecting train and had to buy a new ticket arriving in Granada at midnight.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Here at Los Gázquez we thought it might be nice to blog some of the work from the recent residency from the University of the Arts, MA, London.

It’s best to consider the experience for these artists as experimental and Los Gázquez is a laboratory to explore new ideas. Often as not the work is at the distant end of what you might call  ‘minimal intervention’. These exploratory forays into the natural environment here are testing grounds used as part of a continual cycle of work which manifest themselves in a variety of media from two and three dimensional to video and sound etc.

‘The power and beauty of the landscape at Los Gázquez is totally overwhelming. Any human intervention within it seems tiny and insignificant. Los Gázquez made me think about the fragility of people either within or as part of nature. Tinkering with or changing anything that is already there would have felt like vandalism. By placing human hair within the stream and flowing with the water over the waterfall I added a tiny physical trace of human presence which will inevitably be judged by nature’.

Sophie Eade

Personally, I see a slightly banal but sinister evocation of Ophelia, fallen from a broken bower ‘incapable of her own distress’ and as Sophie Eade says ‘judged by nature’. An innocent victim to trickery and circumstance. Was it a suicide or not? We will never know. Maybe, as I grew up surrounded by Victoriana and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood , I can only equate hair with femininity and loss. A piece of hair held in a locket, the reside of the heart in a symbol of the emotive senses. Raymond Carver’s short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home‘ also comes to mind. It’s a tale of indifference to the suffering of others (a drowning) and the emotional backlash that can come as a consequence of this lack of concern. So my response is to feel some sort of a tangible sense of the mutability and indifference of life and it’s diversity.

This minor installation is still there, over a week on. Now it’s tangled with the spawn of Natterjack toads as new life breeds where old growth demises.

They are here for a week to work collaboratively at Cortijada Los Gázquez. So on their first day I thought we should give them a good introduction to the history, culture and environment of the Comarca de Los Vélez.

The day started with a guided tour of the Castillo de Vélez Blanco and the old Moorish quarter. But for us we had no ordinary guide. Friend of the Joya residency, Dietmar Roth, Deputy Mayor of Vélez Blanco, Councillor for cultural and environmental affairs and academic gave a fantastic tour of the castle and town. We thank him very much for his time and effort.

And then in the early evening we had friend of Los Gázquez,  Maite Frade García, the education officer for the Jardines Botanicos, talk to our artists about the environment here. She covered fundamental issues such as the climate, endemic flora and fauna, cultural and historical utilisation of the land as well as the environmental challenges to come. We thank Maite very much too for her time and effort. As you can see our artists hungrily wrote down the information they received for further research.

Here at Cortijada Los Gázquez we have a new ‘creative holiday’, ‘Paint Safari’. For those familiar with this blog you will know how passionate we are about this landscape. And in the time we have been in this little known region of Andalucía we have come to know our area intimately.

It was on one such excursion recently, having a picnic with the children, that we looked out upon this landscape (the one above) and thought ‘my goodness look, this beautiful wild space already possesses the forms, rhythms and colours of abstract modernist painting’. And sitting as we are, under the awning alongside our faithful (and essential) Land Rover, we thought, ‘what a great experience this could be for our creative guests’.

So here you have it PAINT SAFARI (maximum three people at any one time) out to the semi-wilderness that constitutes large areas of inland Spain. We will be the ‘painters pathfinder’ taking you to a different and fantastic location each day…

(I would like to add at this point that this is an experience for artists of all abilities who either want to learn or just want to take advantage of the opportunity to have an adventure)

Lunch will be under the awning for shade, table and chairs laid out and a special menu befitting the occasion will be served. Afterwards you can return to your painting until early evening where we return to the comfort of Los Gázquez.

And don’t forget we always have Joya resident artists at hand should you want to share your creative experience or gain advice.

But that’s enough here, please look at our web page PAINT SAFARI.

Artist Tamsin Pender has taken up her residency at Cortijada Los Gázquez. We shall follow her progress as her time here unveils and return to her work in due course. However for the purposes of this blog post I want to talk about her father. Tamsin comes from a long line of Cornish artists and of those predecessors most notable was her father, Jack Pender.

This is Jack Pender in his studio in Mousehole in 1955. He was one of the St Ives group of painters and part of the Penwith Society of Artists along with Terry Frost, Barbera Hepworth, Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson amongst others.

I’m a particular fan of 1950/60’s landscape based abstraction so tonight is especially interesting as Tamsin is giving us all a talk on her fathers work and career. I’ve included some examples of Jacks painting over the years mostly from different periods in his life…

Adrift 2 1966

Lamorna 1952

Untitled 1940’s

5pm the sun makes it’s way to setting in the west, the moon rises in the east. High wind blows the rain from beneath the weather front passing to the north of Los Gázquez creating this beautiful rainbow.

How many paintings can you think of with a rainbow?

… or landscapes of Vélez Blanco and the surrounding countryside.

Seasons like these, when the almond blossom bursts into flower, force us to acknowledge that the impact of humanity on the earth’s ecology has been a mixed blessing. However, our long relationship between nature and culture has not been an out and out calamity.

This is a landscape painters paradise, especially at this time of the year. Interestingly the English word ‘landscape’ comes from the Germanic word Landschaft and it signified a unit of human occupation or jurisdiction. So where it might appear that human intervention has manipulated the landscape to correspond to some inner ’spiritual’ concept, it does not. Landscapes are manipulated for food and firewood. American photographer Ansel Adams described the reality of the landscape perfectly, ‘ there is some deep personal distillation of spirit and concept which moulds these earthly facts into some transcendental emotional and spiritual experience‘.

Landscape painting came to be used as the backdrop for familiar motifs of classical myth and sacred scripture. And it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the architects of both of Vélez Blanco’s castles were well aware that, despite the presence of water, this hill is a very good place to build your ‘unit of human occupation’, your dominance over land, man and beast.

I say two castles because the first castle was Moorish (the square structure in the foreground), built from stone and adobe it was destroyed by an earthquake in the 10th century. The houses nestled at it’s feet are the old Moorish homes, secure fiefdoms from the ‘reconquistas’ from the north. The second castle is Renaissance and built by the ‘Marquesas de Los Fajardo‘ in the early 16th century.

Landscape, and it’s consequent representation, is a depository in which to induce some form of  meaningful  mis en scène. Historically it has had more to do with the human condition than the natural. This landscape is the view from Los Gázquez to La Sagra, a sky strewn with wrecked clouds as the sun sets towards Granada. It is our human nature to draw meaning from the void between reality and the view.