Drawing in Morocco
A travel diary in sketches
My wife and I took a trip to Morocco in November. For various reasons, we had not taken a real vacation in more than 12 years. Morocco has long held a fascination for us so we decided that despite the factors that had kept us home for so long, it was time to travel again.
While in Morocco, I decided I wanted to make some art. To keep it as simple as possible, I packed:
- a 5½" x 8½" Strathmore Mixed Media drawing/painting pad
- an HB pencil
- a PaperMate medium-tip black felt-tip pen
- a Faber-Castell Pitt black artist pen with a brush tip
- two 6B graphite sticks
- a small pencil sharpener
- a kneaded (artist’s) eraser.
Not knowing how to choose the best destinations in Morocco, we booked our trip with a travel agent. She recommended a 10-day group package with a well-known tour company. The itinerary included Casablanca, Rabat, Fes, Dades, Marrakech, Essaouira, and back to Casablanca. We would see a lot but I wasn’t sure what opportunities I would have to draw.
Once in Morocco, the pace of our tour made it clear that I couldn’t linger long enough to draw. Instead, it was more practical to review my photos at the end of each day and select one as the basis of that day’s drawing. Each of these drawings was made before bedtime so I limited my time to ¾-hour to 1-hour max.
My drawings do not capture everything I saw. Because of my time limit, the subjects had to be chosen based on something I could complete within that hour. I had to pass on photos with crowds or lots of activity. Photos with a single subject and minimal backgrounds were perfect.
The drawings
On our first evening in Fes, we walked through some back alleys to a restaurant for our group meal. The meal included many amazing courses of traditional Moroccan dishes served in tagines. Along our walk, I spotted this massive door.
Our first morning in Fes started with a guided tour of the Jewish Quarter, named because of the Jewish refugees who fled from Spain in 1438 during the Inquisition. Calmly sitting in the courtyard as our guide talked about the history around us was this street cat.
Cats are a regular part of urban life in Morocco, which is 99% Muslim. In Islam, they are admired for their grooming and ritual cleanliness and are allowed to wander in and out of homes, businesses, and mosques as they please. They rely on the kindness of people who look after them and put out food. During our stay, I can report that we never saw a rat or mouse anywhere.
If you visit the Jewish Quarter in Fes, I can recommend a delicious treat the street vendors sell, dates that are split open, the pit removed, and a walnut placed inside.
We left Fes early the next morning to cross the Atlas Mountains for a long ride to our next destination. Around mid-morning, Mohamed, our tour guide asked our bus driver to pull over so we could see a group of Barbary Apes in a clearing at the edge of a wooded area.
Barbary Apes are a species of macaque native to the Atlas Mountain range in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. They are wild animals so human interaction with them is not advised.
Some tourists from another bus had ventured out among the apes and were feeding them apples. One of the bolder apes grabbed onto the pants leg of this lady to be sure she stayed put and kept the treats coming.
Before we headed south to Dades and the edge of the Western Sahra Desert, we made a trip to the small village of Bhalil, approximately 40 minutes south of Fes. We were there to meet Naima, a Berber tribeswoman who lives in a naturally occurring cave on the side of a mountain. We walked up some steep streets to a clay wall with three very normal-looking doors. We entered the middle door and found ourselves in a cave with plenty of headroom and all the comforts of home.
Naima was a gracious host who showed us the buttons she and the other women in the village make for their traditional garments and demonstrated how she had long carried a full bucket of water on her head from the town’s communal well back to her cave. In-cave plumbing has made this practice unnecessary and the cave is also wired for indoor lighting.
This blog post is from the website of travel consultant Rassa Barcaite and gives a pretty good tour of the interior of and the entrance to the caves.
On the long drive south to Dades, we made a brief stop in a small town that was holding a pop-up market. Our timing was perfect because it was Tuesday, the only day these markets were held. On all other days of the week, the bustle of the vendors and customers doesn’t occur.
People in Morocco aren’t generally fond of posing for photos. To get the shot of this merchant, I caught him in an unguarded moment.
The Majorelle Garden in Marrakech is like entering an oasis inside a bustling city. While strolling through, you are surrounded by varieties of trees and plants from all over the world. Many types of palm trees, cacti, deciduous, and coniferous trees and bushes, not to mention the many flowering plants. The garden also has a large koi pond.
Our guide Mejeed walked us through the garden and filled us in on its history.
The garden was started by French artist Jacques Majorelle early in the 20th century. Sometime in the 1950s, he walked away from the property after his divorce and the garden fell into disrepair. Almost 30 years later, the fashion designers Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé discovered it, purchased the property, and not only brought it back but expanded it.
A museum dedicated to Yves Saint-Laurent’s design work and a Berber museum are also within the complex.
Our second-to-last destination of the tour was Essaouira, a beautiful seaside city on the Atlantic Ocean. On the way, Mohamed asked the bus driver to pull off into a parking lot with an expansive view of the city below for photos. In addition to sightseers enjoying the vista were 2 camels and their owners who were trying hard to convince us to pay them for a short ride.
None of our group took advantage but I did manage to get the photo for my drawing while the attention of the camel’s owner was elsewhere.
After a day in Essaouira, our tour bus left early the next morning for the 6-hour trip back to Casablanca, where our vacation had started. Our time in Morocco was winding down but Mohamed played the movie Casablanca for us on the bus’s overhead monitors and sound system. It had been years since I had seen it.
That evening, a Google search turned up a publicity shot the studio had taken of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. This became the reference for my final drawing in Morocco.
Mohamed explained that the intrigue depicted in the film happened not in Casablanca, but in his home city of Tangier. The movie’s bar, Rick’s Café Américain, was loosely based on the bar of a famous movie house in Tangier, Cinema Vox, which, during wartime, was reportedly often thick with spies, refugees, and underworld characters.
If you would like to purchase giclée prints of any of the artwork I featured in this article, leave me a comment specifying which image. Alternatively, you can contact me through my design website.
I am happy to take on commissions. If you would like portraits of you or your pets, I’m happy to discuss it with you.
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