“Our deserts are wonderlands” (Post 67)

I am using an extract from my Journey with Jeddah coffee table book for this post. This piece comes from the chapter which deals with the desert scenes in oil colour and oil pastel on paper.

The desert in the Saudi Arabian context is a very prominent part of the landscape as all would know, but it appeared to me over the period I spent there that the desert is also a problematic issue in the minds of some people, simply because it is a harsh and beautiful reality too. The luxury of shopping-mall-life and air-conditioned homes have all of us convinced to a degree that the desert should somehow be forgotten. I am not really fond of being in the desert without a purpose and during the heat of the day; I would rather be elsewhere. I have done a few walks with friends who enjoy hiking over the dunes and scaling the rocky hills and during these excursions I took quite a number of photographs; everyone has to agree that the desert at dusk is nothing but beautiful. Words like “wonder”, “mystery” and “freedom” seem to pop to the fore when one looks at the vast desert landscape at the end of the day and when one is camping next to a fire and people are dancing around; life seems to be complete in its simplicity.

In my old boxes in which I kept my art supplies, I discovered a book with unused canvas paper sheets which I had bought more than two decades ago and I decided it was time to use what I had and that I should not be wasteful. So, I painted the backgrounds with a brown and bottle green oil colour, which was the leftover paint that I had from a previous project, and then I waited for a few days. When it was time to paint, I decided to make a few small impressionistic oil paintings and I eventually found myself in the pointillist abstraction domain with regards to the oil paintings. The scenes which do not look so “dotty” are a combination of oil colour and oil pastel and for these I first gave a few oil colour brushstrokes and later I added some colourful highlights with oil pastel.

The desert has a prominent place in the Bible (and perhaps in other religions too), because it is there where the prophets learned to hear God’s voice; they were taught endurance and there they came to grips with who they were perhaps. I think, no one wants to be alone in the desert these days, unless you have a godly purpose and one has the best equipment, a good tent and a phone that has satellite connection; most of us are fleeing from deliberate loneliness.

I shall conclude this post with a quote by Terry Tempest Williams, “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.”