Lebanon - Holland - Painting - Gerti Bierenbroodspot
Nishee
Bringing the past back to life
Dutch artist with a sense of adventure is making her mark in the world of
archeological drawing
Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star
Gerti Bierenbroodspot is the latest in that line of adventurous European
females among them Gertrude Bell, Isabel Burton and Lady Hester Stanhope
who traveled to the Middle East seeking “the wilder shores of love.” Unlike
them, however, she came equipped with more than a romantic passion for
adventure.
Like David Roberts before her, she came with the visionary mission of an
artist, armed with paints and brushes and fired by an intense desire to record
the region’s wealth of antiquities.
As she speaks, her green eyes glitter, mirroring a remarkable reservoir of
enthusiasm, will and energy. She is confident in the spontaneous gestures of
her hands, in the sure strength of her body, in the immediacy of her words. I
look at her and think: here is a woman with a tiger in her tank.
She tells me that her astrological sign is Taurus, with Sagittarius as its
ascendant. “I’m a true Taurus,” she says, “obstinate as a bull and with
my feet firmly on the ground; but I’m lucky to have Sagittarius The Archer is
there, shooting its arrows into the heavens in all directions and leading me in
to adventure.”
Bierenbroodspot was born in Amsterdam to a family of Dutch whalers who were
also adventurers. Her parents, uncles and aunts, in enterprising pursuit of old
worlds to colonize, were lured to the Middle East on several occasions. They
would arrive in Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut or Cairo with trunks piled high on
donkeys and settle in the towns for months at a time.
“I missed all that,” she says, “I was too young and didn’t discover the
Middle East until the mid-80s, a period in my life when I was involved in
archeological drawings and went to Cairo with a Dutch team to draw the
artifacts they dug up. Since then, it’s been an ongoing love affair that I
expect will last the rest of my life. It must be genetic.”
Bierenbroodspot has her principal residence in Amsterdam, but spends six months
every year in the Middle East, much of the time in the Jordanian village of
Taybeh, near Petra, where she holds a lifelong lease on a centuries-old
caravanserai of eight rooms that has been restored to provide modern comforts.
Eerily situated on the edge of a cliff overlooking the vast sandy expanse of
Wadi Araba, it is believed to be haunted by spirits.
Not to be put off by such talk, even welcoming the prospect of communing with
spirits, the Dutch adventurer has made it her second home. In between painting,
she roams the desert on horseback and experiences daily life with its Bedouin
inhabitants.
“They all call me sheikha and the men treat me like one of them,” she
remarks. “It must be because they sense the strong affinity I have with the
male mind. I’m the only woman they allow to join them, even when they’re
gathered in a majlis to resolve a conflict in the community. I still don’t
know much Arabic, but somehow I participate and we communicate.”
She also talks about her chance meeting in Petra with the Dutch woman from New
Zealand who married a Bedouin 15 years ago and is still living there. And how
because she believes that nothing is coincidental saw in the Dutch origin
they shared a sign of her own permanent marriage to Petra.
“We all have a muse in our lives, a guiding spirit that brings us oracles,”
she insists. “I believe mine dwells in a small speckled stone I picked up in
the Egyptian desert, which I keep with me always. I have a Lebanese friend who
says his muse lives in a cedar tree ... I believe in gods and myths and
rituals. Maybe that’s why my art is so totally linked to the past, to a time
when humans still believed in such powers.”
Bierenbroodspot has been painting ancient cities and heroes for decades. She
worked on Pompeii and “Minoan” Crete for years before going to Egypt.
In 1989, she moved to Petra to begin a series on the ancient caravan cities of
the Levant region. She tackled Petra first, the 2,000-year-old wonder of the
Nabataeans, whose mysteries still excite her imagination; then Palmyra (1996
and 1997) on the northern edge of the Syrian desert, where Zenobia reigned in
glory for a brief moment in history; and now Baalbek (1997, 1998 and 1999),
Lebanon’s famed City of the Sun.
In Baalbek, Bierenbroodspot took over the entire top floor of the Palmyra Hotel
and turned it into a studio. Early every morning, with a small satchel of
colors, brushes and rice paper on her back and a drawing board under her arm,
she would take off for the ruins on some days climbing up the 96 steps of
Bacchus Temple to perch like a bird atop its columns, on other days sitting in
different corners in the courtyard of the Jupiter Temple or at entrances to the
Venus and Adonis temples, where she intimately examined and recorded the
multitude of elaborate details they contained.
After hours of work on site and in her hotel studio, evenings brought the
artist welcome relief with her many friends in the Baalbek community.
Two years ago, in a formal ceremony by the town’s officials, Bierenbroodspot
was made an honorary citizen of Baalbek. A few years earlier, she had received
similar recognition in Jordan when she was named a Knight in the Order of the
Hashemite Palace. She is visibly pleased, but asks with a mischievous smile,
“does this mean I’ll have to pay taxes?”
Bierenbroodspot’s paintings of Baalbek, along with a few of Tyre, Sidon,
Byblos and Beirut, are exhibited at the newly reopened National Museum.
For more information and visuals on the artist, visit her website:
www.bierenbroodspot.com