In the 1970s a group of Norwegian artists bought an
abandoned and near derelict farmhouse in the Monserrat region of southern
Spain. Over the next four years they restored and repaired and now, 30 years
later, it is a thriving community of international and local artists.
The house sits in the bottom of a valley on the old road to
Barcelona. The new road runs along the escarpment 100 meters south. So while it
is only a five minute walk up the hill to the town of El Bruc with its
complement of shops and cafes, the house itself is an island, and the only other
signs of human intervention in the landscape are the almond orchards, recently
in bloom, and now full of the green furred fruit that the Syrians eat unripe
with lemon and salt.
The artists are a mix of painters, drawers, sculptors,
printmakers and illustrators. P____ is working on a graphic novel about
Picasso's Guernica, M___ embroiders death's heads onto folk art fabrics,
W___ walks in the valleys and low hills and draws the spectacular, many
fingered ridge of the mountain range.
Because the studios are large I have begun work on a series
of charcoal drawings of cities from my travels. A small piece of Cairo is
reforming itself here in the stillness and quiet of southern Spain. I joke with
J______ that it would have been good to make a recording of the sounds of the
Darb al Ahmar, so that now the studio would be full of the noise of
schoolchildren, band saws in the woodworking district, taxis, delivery men and,
five times a day, the roar from the mosques.
Or not, and this other Cairo is quiet in ways the original
is only rarely. Emptied of people, the stoves of the kitchens no longer
smoking, the streets no longer full of traffic. In one window of the endless
apartment buildings a rug is being aired in the spring sunshine.
