When I began this pastel a month ago, I was thinking with longing about the silvery olive trees in Greece, billowing in the wind off the sea and the mountain tops. That was before the wildfires began that are now raging across the mainland and the Peloponnese, bringing enormous destruction, suffering and loss. Today I look at this picture with different eyes, and have been thinking of the legend of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humans -- for that deed he was glorified by humans, but punished by Zeus, who chained him to a rock where an eagle continually preyed upon his liver, until Hercules freed him many centuries later. But it has taken three millennia for us to begin to understand the deeper meaning behind that myth, and why the gods might not have wanted man to have fire, and to start to recognize the results and the price of our selfish neglect of the earth and all its gifts.
--
This particular olive tree grows at the top of a hill in Epidaurus, site of perhaps the most perfect ancient Greek theater, and of the shrine of Asclepias: a sacred place of pilgrimage and healing for the ancient Greeks. I had climbed up all the steps of the theater to the very top, and then looked out over the back in the opposite direction, where there was a farmer's road and a grove of olive trees, whose leaves made rustling music in the wind.
In the pastel, I tried to capture that sense of restless, continual movement against the stony ochre-tinged earth and the tall mountains in the distance: the time I spent contemplating that scene remains a memory just as vivid as that of the theater and the surrounding shrine. Here is an early stage of the picture, after the first few hours of work:
and another, after a second session:
In the end, it took quite a bit of time to figure out where I wanted to go with this, and how to create a feeling of density as well as movement, where light played with obscurity and shadow. The colors changed too, with the hills and sky becoming a much brighter, clearer blue to complement the reddish earth under the trees.
Because pastel occupies a sort of middle-ground between drawing and brush-painting, it lends itself to expressive drawn strokes as well as rich color and texture that can be built up through layer upon layer. In this case it seemed to suit the way the olive tree grows -- all those tiny leaves that actually create a dense, thick mass of foliage that's dark on the inside, close to the trunk, and shimmery on the outer edges where individual leaves catch the light. As I worked, I had the sense of building something solid out of evanescent powder and pigment, some of which comes originally from the earth -- which is the strangeness of this particular medium.
Like so much of nature, the olive tree is an enigmatic combination of strength and delicacy, and yet it cannot withstand fire. In Greece, much of the land is covered with trees, and an unimaginable number of those trees are olives -- so surely they are burning.
The Greek poet George Sefaris wrote a poem called "Fires of St John." The title refers to the Christian practice, begun in Medieval times, of lighting fires on the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist, who was described in the Gospel of John as "a burning and a shining light". His feast day is June 24, so it coincided loosely and conveniently with the Summer Solstice, when pagan elements like fire and light and water were already celebrated. The tradition of lighting fires on the eve of St John's feast spread throughout Christendom, and in rural mountainous regions, fires were often lit in a succession along mountain tops. In Sefaris' childhood village in Asia Minor, it was traditional for children to light small fires in the streets and jump over them for good luck. The poem also mentions Herostratus, a Greek arsonist in the 4th century BC who set fire to the Temple of Artemis in order to gain immortal notoriety for himself - a reason he confessed under torture. After his execution, it was forbidden for his name to be mentioned ever again, but instead, it's become synonymous with a person who commits a crime in order to become famous.
Here's the second half of Sefaris' poem:
It is the children who light the fires and cry out before the
flames in the hot night (Was there ever a fire that some
child did not light, O Herostratus)
and throw salt on the flames to make them crackle (How
strangely the houses - crucibles for men - suddenly stare
at us when the flame's reflection caresses them).
But you who knew the stone's grace on the sea-whipped rock
the evening when stillness fell
heard from far off the human voice of loneliness and silence
inside your body
that night of St John
when all the fires went out
and you studied the ashes under the stars.
