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After the last debreefing, all students had free time. Some went in the town, others rented horses to ride on the countryside. At the same time, the professors  met to discuss about the future landscape ambassador course that  will be o rganised by Roland  in october  in Sweden.

During the evening,  after the dinner, it was the last friendly discussions and the students started a party that finished very early in the morning.

(I have many pictures to add but  they will come tomorrow)

At 2.00 pm, the students who will have to present the work went down and started a last repetition
 The place was very nice, old building from the XVII th century as you can see on the photo

As they had so many thngs to say, the students decided to put some extra documents on the walls.

MAny people went at the presentation and at 4.15 pm, the room was full.


For the presentation we used 2 beemers one with the english version, one with a portugese translation and it works very well
 

after the presentaton, very well appreciated by the locals and the official, a good discussion started

we had the chance to wecomme Mr Derevier, the represnetative of Frech ambassy who had contributed to finance the course and hse started with some questions related to orgnic farming and the consequences of the new  airport project and the TGV line.

The answers have been driven in Anglish, sometime in Portuguese. The opinion of the public was a good way to evaluate that the work was serious, professional but also very sensitive and human related.

At the end, the strudents invited the persons that had welcome them during the seminar and ffered them a little present.

After 2 hours meeting, we passed to the second step, the Montemor buffet, that permit to continue the discussion in a more open way.

What happened after , it's another adventure t as wasn't present, I haven't anything to tell about.

Manuel Casa Branca is a teacher and journalist in Montemor who started an artist's education some years ago. Before he went to LIsbon, he had painted "science fiction", and when he got to the city, he realized that he needed to deal with his native countryside, which was what he really understood. Since then he has painted cork oaks.



He approaches each tree as a personality and he sees the different trees as having relationships as if they were persons. There are trees with straight trunks that are proud and on their own, and there are the trees that express a relationship with other trees, because their branches stretching out as if they were fingers on a hand. For him as a painter, the "spaces" created between the branches are an important shape in each picture, just as important as the form of each branch.

Some of the views of the landscape of Montemor, Manuel compares with jazz. It is a landscape with varying dotted patterns, as if a rythmic complexity. He goes to the river sometimes because it is cool, and he calls it the landscape of light and shade. He likes the blue of the sky reflected in the waer, but he finds this landscape difficult to paint. He finds the views of the castle seen in between trees interesting, because, what is the point of interest in these views is the most distant and the least visible, especially if it is hazy like now.

Lately he has made a series of pictures that are more bstract that he calls "Re-montada", because they are a way of understanding this landscape in a more conceptualized way. There are women, because he finds this landscape female: the portuguese religion emphasizes the female aspect of the spiritual in that very many of the churches are dedicated to "Nossa Segnora ....".The different tree-shapes are used as symbols or "letters".

       




In one picture, Manuel has expressed his feelings about the increasing amount of fences. Movement in the landcape is forced to become more geometric, where it used to be a free flow.