Jo Bertini: Under a Saffron Sky – The Wild Desert Mountains of Andalusia

Spikes & spines, sharp stones, baking light, snakes, land replete with creatures & a soft subtle beauty. Flushed rose, pollen yellows, wild windy grasses … saffron crocus and scattered bone … sunlit chalk, lines jagged and sharp as cut stone …  First impressions are magnetic; first impressions act as talismans; they create a kind of sensory memory map of a place. Jo Bertini’s first impressions of Joya (a remote off-grid artist residency in Spain’s Andalusian desert) make note of colours, textures, shapes, wildlife, weather, ecology, botany, layers of history, the changing quality of light. Later, in the studio, these impressions are transmuted onto canvas, via myriad freehand pencil, gouache and watercolour sketches made as she sits or walks through the landscape.

Bertini has spent the last two and a half decades sketching deserts and painting them. Her forays into the heart of Australia, walking alongside scientific researchers, ecologists and indigenous elders as an expedition artist have been well documented. Since moving to Abiquiu, she’s immersed her practice in the northern desert landscapes of New Mexico.  The invitation to Joya in 2025 presented an opportunity to experience Desierto de Tabernas, Europe’s only officially designated true “desert” and a chance to return to the continent for the first time in almost 30 years.

“That European light – I’d forgot about it. It has this opaque brightness to it,” says Bertini. “At Joya, the light was really silvery and the contrast was incredibly strong, you could pick out herbs and flowers from a distance, like a painting with a white ground.”  She was struck not only by the whiteness of the landscape – the chalk, marble and limestone – but also the botanical richness with thyme, sage and fennel growing wild, golden esparto grass, old remnant groves of olives and almonds (originally planted by Moorish travelers), Aleppo pines and even Australian eucalypts introduced to stabilise arid country.  Joya is situated in the Sierra Maria-Los Velez Natural Park – home to an extraordinary variety of exotic insects and birds.

Bertini is drawn to the commonality of the deserts she visits, spends time in, and lives in, as well as their unique qualities. The way hidden, cyclical watercourses shape the land, for instance, the fragile ecosystems, and the migratory, transitory nature of human passage. Existentially, wild places allow us to put down burdens.  “You need very, very little - that’s what Robyn Davidson said to me when I first met her,” says Bertini. “Why are you carrying all these burdens, put them down, you don’t need any of that, just put them down and walk away.”

Bertini paints in oils, oil stick and iridescent pigments on linen or canvas. There’s a strong Cezanne influence, a post-impressionist grounding to the way she figures the landscape: the heightened colour, the fragmentation of the picture plane, the sensory insistence of the paint. She recently began using oil sticks with a new plasticity enabling her to draw and paint simultaneously. And of course, colour is key. “There’s something else I wanted to say about Cezanne:” wrote the poet Rilke, “that no one else before him demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting takes place among the colours, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves.”  (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne)

Bertini’s use of iridescent pigments mixed with hand-ground pigments and oils adds another dimension. The shimmer seems to converse with Australian indigenous desert art and allows for shifts in tone and colour depending on the angle of the viewer and the fall of available light on the surface of the picture. “It’s a bit like the traveling light in the landscape,” she says. “I want it to be inherent in the painting, I want the painting to capture the light and keep changing, iridescence is the only pigment that really does that for me.” The artist sees herself as shining a female lens on landscape, a sense of being in country without intruding or demanding anything from it. Her paintings are creative acts of presence, of homage, of devotion, even perhaps of love. For Bertini, in essence, deserts are about seeing; deserts, for her, are where she can see clearly and therefore paint the world.

Susie Burge, Arts Writer