The Land
Returning to Portugal is also a return to the land. The countryside was his place of peace. He would return to Quinta da Carvalha, to the readings of Rodrigues Lobo, with whom he certainly identified through his love of Nature and his native land. Like Rodrigues Lobo, he also organized around him a "Village Court", this one with a more cosmopolitan background and in a country more open to the outside. Baltazar Gomes Figueira was another "neighbour", who knew how to acclimatize his Sevillian learning in the village of Óbidos and with whom Jorge Estrela spoke with special pleasure and whose work managed to bring to light, and whose work managed to bring to light, after centuries forgotten in the shadow of the work of his daughter, Josefa de Óbidos.
The Fruits
Jorge Estrela saw himself as a painter. His gaze was deeply pictorial, and loaded with an knowledge that allowed him to look at the painting, for example, of the aforementioned Baltazar Gomes Figueira, identifying the scientific name of each plant, each flower, each fruit, thus undoing superficial interpretations.
He could spend a morning in the mountains looking at mushrooms, then prepare a feast with the ones he'd picked. This interest led him to found, in 1990, the Portuguese Society of Mycology. He would transfer all these experiences to painting, from quick notes in field notebooks to rigorously finished boards, or to a gathering accompanied by a bottle of wine for which he had designed the label.
Poem Mushrooms
