Landscape with Three Olive Trees 

Curator: Here we have “Landscape with Three Olive Trees”, an ink drawing and print by Tomás Joseph Harris. Editor: Wow, the trees look like they're dancing! Almost playful in a serious sort of landscape. They're twisted, but not in agony, more like... joyfully warped. What do you make of the setting? Curator: The artwork employs a landscape style reminiscent of classic pastoral scenes, emphasizing a serene and idealized view of nature, and a rejection of industrialized life, yet done with the speed of mass printing methods that helped grow those cities. How does it challenge or play into this idea, do you think? Editor: I feel a strange serenity mixed with underlying turmoil. It feels incomplete and yet satisfying, as if the pen had much more to tell us, it ended exactly at the right moment to get our imaginations thinking. Curator: It’s interesting that you pick up on both serenity and turmoil. There's certainly a dichotomy here between the smooth distant mountains and rough textures of the foreground, achieved with these fine ink lines. Editor: And even the marks that didn't make much sense, in nature, almost made more sense to the emotional language. Are we supposed to see specific, familiar olive trees, or universal ones? Is the focus a reflection on place, or memory? Curator: Harris seems to invoke familiar imagery associated with the Mediterranean, the Olive tree. Yet they aren’t depicted majestically or idealized in this composition. We aren’t quite getting realism as it is seen through the eyes. The olives may as well be redwoods or ancient oaks. The trees don’t seem bound to location but act as a cultural cipher with global associations and applications. Editor: Yes! It brings up a feeling that it's all in our heads, that even the landscape, just like art, are an illusion to the language of feelings. Thank you for all of the art insights, you have opened my mind for sure! Curator: And likewise! Your poetic perspectives never cease to amaze!