Olive Trees

Ancient olive tree at dusk, Canicattini Bagni, Sicily. Oil on linen, 10” x 10”.

For some people, the Mediterranean conjures visions of white-washed stucco, tile roofs, and lemons. For me, it’s the uncanny azure of the sea, the quality of the light, and olive trees. It astonished me, in Greece, to see entire mountains covered with olive trees growing wild. In Sicily and in Greece, I encountered olive trees with thick, twisted trunks that had been alive for many centuries if not millennia. (A tree in Crete is thought to be the oldest one in the world: somewhere between between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, and still bearing fruit.)

Unlike the redwoods or sequoias of the American West, ancient olive trees are not tall; they remain at a scale that feels like an accompaniment to humanity, to whom they give their fruit. And yet, even as we walk through their groves or ponder a single tree, there is something about them that remains unknowable, wise and silent as a sage, while being approachable on foot and by eyes that don’t have to range too far above our own heads. You sense that you are a visitor, as if to a living shrine that was there long before you were born, and will remain long after you’ve left this earth. This makes the deliberate destruction of Palestinian olive groves, tended by families for centuries, all the more devastating.

I became fascinated by olive trees at first sight. Fascinated is not exactly the right word. I felt drawn to them; I felt they had something to impart, as if I’d been waiting all my life to have these encounters. The olive trees at Delphi, Mycenae, Epidaurus, and the Acropolis were as moving and mystical to me as the ruins. Eventually, I stopped trying to put this feeling into words on the page or even in my head. I began drawing them, searching out their form and trying to listen to their essence with all of my senses. It was, and remains, difficult, but their beauty and wisdom, if that is an appropriate word, continue to draw me. I miss them when I’m not there.

My father-in-law, who many of you may remember from my writings about him, was very nostalgic about olive trees and sometimes had a small seedling growing in his home. They never survived very long, but he was persistent… and romantic. This winter I found an extremely convincing, small, faux olive tree in a shop in Mexico and almost bought it to bring back to cold Montreal, but its visual verisimilitude combined with a total lack of real presence somehow made its unreality all the more stark. I’ll just have to continue to search them out in art.

The oil painting here is one I worked on a couple of weeks ago. I’m not satisfied with it although there are aspects I like — the delicacy of the leaves, especially.

As a total composition, I prefer the small preliminary drawing I made in my sketchbook, in pencil:

After the oil painting I also made a fast oil pastel of the same tree: good for its vigor, but the delicacy is lost.

I have many more drawings and watercolors of olive trees, and in writing this post, I found a number of pictures I’d forgotten that I want to draw or paint.

Old olive trees along a road near Sparta, Greece.

It’s satisfying to find subjects that feel inexhaustible. With this one, I’m in good company: Vincent Van Gogh also loved and revered olive trees. He drew and painted them many times, and, like me, he still felt there was something about them that defied capture. He wrote to his brother Theo:

“I am struggling to catch (the olive trees). They are old silver, sometimes with more blue in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange... very difficult”… “the rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it or to be able to imagine it.”