PAINTING THE CARIBBEAN
A symposium at
the University of Essex, 6-7 May 2011
Abstracts
María
Clara Bernal (Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia)
Imagining Africa in the Caribbean: The Work of Wifredo Lam and Hector Hyppolite
In 1941 Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz published his book Cuban
Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Using tobacco and sugar, as allegorical
characters Ortiz tackled the problematic issue of cultural contact - especially
between black and white - in Cuban society and culture. With this as a
contextual framework I propose to examine the work of two painters: Cuban
Wifredo Lam and Haitian Hector Hyppolite. Through their work both artists have
raised issues about the dialogue between the black culture of Africa and the
European inheritance in the consolidation of visual arts in the Caribbean.
Judith
Bettelheim (UCLA)
Cuban artists comment on Cuba
The Graduate Institute of the Arts in Havana was founded in 1976, and its
first graduates began to exhibit publicly in the 1980s. Thus began what is
considered “Contemporary Cuban Art.” In this discussion I will explore the work
of several artists who, since the 1980s, have produced work which comments on
their island, their homeland. Each employs a distinct tactic, both in subject
matter and style, to produce work that demonstrates that “home” is a conflicted
territory. And each questions recent Cuban history. Artists José Bedia, Carlos
Garaicoa, Sandra Ramos, Ibrahim Miranda and Roberto Diago, among others, employ
potentially ambiguous visual forms and materials to produce a double-coded
visual strategy, useful when challenged by the authorities in a climate where
the threat of censorship is real. Some, like Garaicoa or Diago, choose to locate
their commentary in Havana’s public spaces, in disintegrating architecture and
the urban landscape. Others, like Ramos and Miranda, rely on mapping projects,
or constructed images of the island itself. Bedia, especially in his
installation work, conflates imagery derived from his practice of the Afro-Cuban
religion Palo Monte with text and painted references to his homeland. Having
left Cuba in 1991, he demonstrates that he is always attached to ‘home,’ and
produces small history lessons to help explicate his precarious position as some
one forever living in between.
Danielle
Delon (Trinidad & Tobago))
A
Victorian Woman’s Perspective of Trinidad: Margaret Mann and
Michel Jean Cazabon
In the mid-18th century a young woman named Margaret Mann, from Guernsey in the
Channel Islands, accompanied her husband, Royal Engineer Gother Mann, to his
posting in Trinidad. For five years her husband worked closely with Lord Harris,
the British Governor, who was an unusual man in that he befriended and
patronised a coloured man--a talented painter--Michel Jean Cazabon.
Cazabon was the first native artist to record a substantial number of scenes of
the island and the people of Trinidad during an interesting historical period in
its development. Those paintings, by the country's foremost watercolourist,
today form part of the Belmont House collection in Faversham, Kent, and the
National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad Tobago, Port of Spain. The paintings
of Margaret Mann, Cazabon’s student, also form part of the national collection
known as the Cazabon-Mann collection. As the wife of the Royal Engineer,
Margaret Mann enjoyed a certain vantage point on society at a time when the
socio-political climate was one of exclusion to any part of society outside the
tight circle of the aristocratic English ruling class, to which she belonged.
From 1847-1851 frequent letters to her family back in the Channel Islands
contained her views on her milieu, while her paintings recorded her physical
environment. Drawing on my published work, The Letters of Margaret Mann,
which contains several of Mann's watercolours, I will show how Mann's European
sensibility influenced her tropical paintings and how those paintings expressed
a different reality from that reflected in her private writings.
Ian
Dudley (Essex)
Indigenous
Guyana in the Paintings of Edward Goodall and Aubrey
Williams
In
biographical and stylistic terms, English artist Edward Goodall (1819-1908) and
Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams (1926-90) could not be more distinct, yet beyond
these disparities, their work is linked by the presence of Guyana, and more
particularly the referencing and representation of the country’s indigenous
peoples and the material and psychological worlds they inhabited. Goodall was a
London born, Royal Academy trained, watercolourist. The son of a renowned
engraver, whose patrons included Turner, the aspiring artist travelled to
Guyana, then British Guiana, for three years between 1841-44, in the capacity of
official illustrator for the surveying expeditions of Prussian explorer Robert
Schomburgk. In this role he produced over 250 watercolours, concentrating
largely on Guyana’s indigenous populations, with whom he enjoyed a sustained and
intense contact, but also recording geography, botany, zoology, geology,
architecture, colonial society and expedition scenes. As befitted the
documentary imperatives of a scientific mission, Goodall rendered his subjects
in a measured and naturalistic realism, devoid of the romantic caprices that
characterized other traveller artists of the period. Aubrey Williams on the
other hand, was born and raised in Guyana’s capital Georgetown. The son of a
civil servant, he was for the most part, self-taught as an oil painter. Being of
mainly African descent, his ancestors would have been amongst the recently
emancipated slaves about whom Goodall wrote so disdainfully in his Guyana diary
in the 1840s. Like Goodall, Williams had been profoundly affected by a youthful
experience in the Guyanese interior, a two-year period spent among the Warao
while working as an agricultural officer in the 1940s. Having later emigrated to
the UK in the 1950s, Williams developed a complex and highly personal style of
abstraction, deeply rooted in the landscape, culture and memory of his native
country. This paper will describe and compare Goodall’s and Williams’
respective experiences of indigenous Guyana, and the divergent ways they are
represented in their paintings. Despite the differing nature of their
interpretations, I will assert that Goodall’s and Williams’ work not only
reflects a serious and profound engagement with Guyana’s indigenous cultures,
based on the deep respect both artists developed for them, but that it also
evidences a considerable and informed knowledge that could only emerge from
first hand experience. This experience, comparable perhaps to ethnographic
fieldwork, sets them apart from many artists who have appropriated indigenous
American subject matter into their art.
Louise
Fenton (Wolverhampton)
Images of
Haiti: The Culture and History of
Haiti through the Paintings of the Houngan
This paper
will explore the paintings of the Vodou Priests, the Houngan, whose work has
represented the spirits, the history and the culture of Haiti throughout the
twentieth century. The paintings to be considered will include the work of
Hector Hyppolite and Pierrot Barra who were both Houngan of the Rada and Petro
pantheons (positive and negative forces). Haiti has been misrepresented through
the cultural productions of the West and yet these honest, naive paintings by
Haitians provide a glimpse into the history and spiritual culture that underpins
this fascinating and oft misunderstood Caribbean country.
Maria
Cristina Fumagalli (Essex)
Painting Caribbean Modernity: Derek
Walcott and the 'Academy’s Outcasts'
In this paper I propose to read
Derek Walcott’s interest in the work of artists like Gustave Courbet
(1819-1897), Camille Pisarro (1831-1903), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Paul
Cézanne (1839-1906), Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) as an
attempt to reassess nineteenth-century North Atlantic modernity and its
homogenising forces from a Caribbean perspective. I put Walcott's paintings in
dialogue with his own poetry (mainly from Tiepolo's Hound) and the works
of the nineteenth- century masters with some of his own paintings.
Joanne Harwood (Essex)
Painting the Caribbean from Near and Afar: Armando Reverón and Ofelia Rodríguez
In this talk I will consider the
approaches to painting the Caribbean of Armando Reverón (b. 1889, Caracas -
d.1954 Caracas) and Ofelia Rodríguez (b. 1947, Barranquilla - ). Reverón is a
celebrated Modernist painter from Venezuela, most of whose work is inspired by
the luminous coast and landscape of the Venezuelan Caribbean town of Macuto.
Rodríguez, who is represented in the University of Essex Collection of Latin
American Art by six artworks, was born in the Colombian Caribbean town of
Barranquilla, where she works when she is not at her London base. It is
interesting to consider whether the differences between these artists’ treatment
of their Caribbean context relates to their closeness to it and to explore the
response of critics to the Caribbean-ness of Reverón and Rodríguez’s paintings.
Evelyn
O'Callaghan (UWI-Cave Hill)
Marketing
Caribbean
Landscapes: the Case of William Beckford of Somerley and George Robertson
One of
the quiet revolutions which has taken place in the study of Caribbean literature
is a expansion of the field of study beyond scribal works to oral and visual
texts, and this paper proposes to advocate the continued value of a comparative
interdisciplinary approach. Accordingly, I draw on William Beckford’s A
Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, published in 1790, and on the
paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by the itinerant artist, George
Robertson. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I suggest that “imperial
picturesque landscaping aesthetics” in the text are reinforced by the
images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and to mask the materialist
matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque
composition.
Désha
Osborne (Cambridge)
Image
and Revolution: Brunias and the Caribs of
St. Vincent
In 1997,
when St. Vincent and the Grenadines announced that 14 March would
forever be known as ‘National Heroes Day’, one image became the symbol of the
nation’s final act of independence. While many Caribbean scholars and art
historians recognize the image as part of a painting by eighteenth century
Italian artist Agostino Brunias’s work titled “Chatoyer the Chief of the Black
Charaibes in St. Vincent with his five Wives,” the isolated figure of the late
Carib chief and official National Hero of St. Vincent came to represent more
than Brunias or his patron Sir William Young ever imagined. This paper will
trace the path the image of Chatoyer made in two of Brunias’s paintings from a
representation of a moment in colonial history to national symbol.
Lisa
Paravisini (Vassar)
Painting Sugar Cane: Ethics and Aesthetics of a Problematic Representation
One of Puerto Rico’s foundational texts, the nineteenth-century poem “A
Puerto Rico,” by José Gautier Benítez, celebrates the beauty of the guajana—the
flower of the cane plant—as a landscape marker than stands for the natural
beauty on the embryonic nation. This problematic celebration of a flower that is
aesthetically beautiful but whose representation is ethically compromised by the
historical realities of the plantation, is my point of departure for a
discussion of the interstices between ethics and aesthetics in some Caribbean
painting. Using examples ranging from Frans Post’s seventeenth-century paintings
of Brazilian plantations to Cuban artist Tania Brugueras’ 2010 Havana video
installation, I use paintings of sugar cane as the entry point for an analysis
of problematic representations of Caribbean history.
Judy
Raymond (Trinidad & Tobago)
The
Final Passage of Richard Bridgens
Born in
northern England in the late eighteenth century, Richard Bridgens began his
career as a furniture designer in the great slaving
port
of Liverpool. He was fortunate enough to become the protégé of the celebrated
George Bullock. After Bullock’s death, however, Bridgens is said to have had
trouble attracting enough clients for what has been described as an
“architectural practice” and so he and his family sailed for Trinidad, where his
wife had inherited a share in a sugar plantation. English writers say little is
known of his career after this point, and have been led further astray by the
misleading subtitle of the book of sketches he produced during his time in
Trinidad: West India scenery with illustrations of Negro character, the
process of making sugar, &c. from sketches taken during a voyage to, and
residence of seven years in, the island of Trinidad. It has generally been
supposed that Bridgens returned to England after that time. In fact research on
the ground in
Trinidad shows he remained there for the
rest of his life, ie 1826-46. Bridgens was thus rare among Europeans in being
more than merely a bird of passage through the sugar colonies. He had produced a
book of sketches after his travels in
Europe which show that his interest in
people was not so much artistic as anthropological, and that extended even
further when he encountered new people and a new way of life in the
West Indies.
His drawings of the people he came across in
Trinidad focus almost exclusively on
slaves, some of them probably from his own estate. In this regard—that he was
not only an artist but also a slave-owner—Bridgens may have been unique in the
region. The book he produced while living here is increasingly used to
illustrate exhibitions and books on slavery and in the growing field of
Caribbean
art history. Using internal evidence and unpublished drawings, I also argue that
despite the overtly racist and anti-abolitionist intentions and attitudes of his
drawings and accompanying text, Bridgens was in fact also fascinated by and a
keen student and recorder of the new culture he saw springing up around him. His
work has sometimes understandably been dismissed as racist caricature, and his
own working-class origins and lack of talent at self-promotion have contributed
to his being so little known. As a result, the importance of his work as a
record of and hence a means to the understanding of the development of that
culture has been underestimated.
Kim
Robinson-Walcott (UWI-Mona)
Visual-verbal Vistas: Caribbean Writers Who Paint
I find
it striking that a number of Jamaica’s creative writers are also artists: Roger
Mais, Lorna Goodison, Earl McKenzie, among others, spring readily to mind. The
phenomenon is not of course restricted to Jamaica: there are Derek Walcott and
LeRoy Clarke, among probably many others – including VS Naipaul who, I
discovered recently, studied art in his teens and was considered proficient. The
coincidence should perhaps not be surprising. As Dolace McLean notes in her
brief essay “Narrative Aesthetics of the Caribbean” in Writers Who
Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists (Peepal Tree, 2007), “all
art, visual or written, is a transient, fragile and beautiful light contained
within a creative energy that chooses each writer/artist as a means of
expression”. Yet, is there a special creative sensitivity or sensibility
revealed in the writings of those writers who also paint? Clearly, there is
added dimension of enrichment. This essay will explore the enrichment evident in
the visual-verbal creativity of Mais, Goodison, McKenzie and others. The
painterly qualities in Goodison’s writings are remarkable, most recently in her
memoir From Harvey River (2007). McKenzie often paints visual versions of
his poems, and sometimes executes scribal versions of his paintings. Does the
Jamaican or Caribbean environment in any way especially encourage or promote
visual-verbal combinations of creative expression? Or, and I raise this point
very tentatively, might there be a peculiarly Jamaican or Caribbean narrative
aesthetic which lends itself to such dual expression?
Lawrence
Scott (Trinidad & Tobago)
Michael Jean Cazabon: Artist of the Emancipation
A traditional and conservative view of Michel Jean Cazabon’s paintings argue
that they are mere recordings of what Trinidad and the Caribbean looked like in
the nineteenth century. He painted for governors and rich planters and he
himself was from a wealthy “free-coloured” family. All this is true. But was
that all there was to it? Was he a flatterer of the rich? Or, was he a subtle
rebel? Looking first at some artists and illustrators who preceded Michel
Jean Cazabon in the fist half of the nineteenth century, I argue for a different
interpretation of Cazabon’s significance, seeing Cazabon as contesting
stereotypes and renovating images both of the human figure and of the landscape.
By looking in particular at Cazabon's portraits and landscapes, and at three of
his students’ work, I try to discover what shaped the artist’s
personality, what conditioned his motivation,s and what fashioned his ideas.
Leon
Wainwright (Manchester Metropolitan)
Aubrey Williams and the Temporality of Painting
Guyana-born (then
British Guiana) artist
Aubrey
Williams (b. 1926) experienced in the 1950s and 60s critics’ attempts to
categorise his paintings in terms of ‘connections’ to either a ‘Caribbean’ or
‘European’ heritage. Critics in
Britain
wrote about the ‘primitive urgency’, evidenced in the ‘tropical forests and
primeval ritual dances’ that they saw in his canvases, a description of him as
primitive and therefore not modern. This was perhaps a familiar response to
artists of the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, who converged on Britain with a view
to establishing themselves there during the period of decolonisation. What makes
Williams’s reception especially significant is the sense of disappointment among
critics that his time in Britain had made his primitivism seem less ‘urgent’
than when he first arrived. They wrote that ‘England had tamed him’, and that
his tropicality had receded in time – that, perhaps like food, his art would
pass from the raw, to the cooked. Critics arraigned against him a politics of
artistic development that was seen as inevitable and teleological so that,
whatever Williams’s ‘progress’, he was reminded of having to play catch up
against the historical clock. This presentation will show how ideas about time,
and connected ones to do with space, are also implicit in the contemporary, more
revisionist interest in Williams. Indeed, there are some unexpected continuities
with the longer history of his reception as an artist. The redeeming basis for
rethinking the terms of Williams’s reception and his posthumous inscription in
art history and curating may be found in his art itself, which has remained a
locus of criticism through associations with outdatedness and anachronism. These
terms may be recuperated however as part of a general framework for analysing
the historical positioning of an artist who continued to be occupied with
painting, even as the medium became increasingly outmoded. As such Williams’s
art represents a key contribution to the politics of anti-colonialism in its
dealings with the status of painting, and also causes us to examine other
contexts of painting differently, such as the wider Atlantic and in particular
Britain. It prompts an appreciation that anachronism has a less than essential
character, and that it offers a useful margin for ambiguity – since the
accusation of being late and out of date can still be turned on its head.
Anne
Walmsley (London)
Beyond Painted Scene: Art in the Caribbean
Art in the Caribbean: an Introduction, published by New Beacon Books in
October 2010, is co-authored by myself and Stanley Greaves, Guyana-born artist
and art teacher, with the collaboration of Christopher Cozier, artist and
curator, born and based in Trinidad and Tobago. Derek Walcott writes how he and
Dunstan St Omer (Gregorias), as teenagers in St Lucia, set about painting the
island and its people, of Cazabon and Pissarro as their only known
Caribbean-born precursors. Our book, dedicated to the young of the Caribbean,
presents in its Gallery section artworks made from the 1940s to the present day,
by people born and working in the region. The book’s accompanying Historical
Background section deepens and extends the context of its Gallery artworks by a
concise survey of art-making in Pre-Columbian times, in the period of
colonization and early independence, and in modern and contemporary times. Both
sections span the arc of the Caribbean: from Belize, through the Antillean
Archipelago to the Guianas. Paintings reproduced in both sections are not
limited to representations of ‘the places of the Caribbean’, and appear as
telling on wall or musical instrument as on board or canvas. Nor are the
artworks limited to painting. Sculpture and ceramics, prints and graphics,
photography and video, festival arts and installations: works in these art forms
spring from the region’s widely-sourced, deep-rooted visual practice. Art in the
region today explores the range of forms of the contemporary global art world in
which, increasingly, it is shown.
Penny
Woollard (Essex)
Painting Derek Walcott’s Caribbean: Romare Bearden
How does an
artist to paint a visual response to poetry? In this paper I address that
question by examining a work, published in 1983, The Caribbean Poetry of
Derek Walcott and the Art of Romare Bearden. This combination of their
creative expressions exemplifies a close artistic relationship between a
Caribbean writer and an American artist which attempts a reciprocal portrayal of
their vision of the Caribbean.
