THE idea that European colonial culture was imposed in Guyana, and therefore should be replaced after Independence by an excavation, or return, or increase of each ethnicity’s original culture, became an easy solution to the unavoidable local cultural problem of pursuing a recognised collective direction in the arts.

A PROGRESSIVE CULTURAL DIRECTION

It would be the individual Guyanese (born) painter, writer, sculptor, musician or even film-maker, who applied their various individual styles in pursuing this national direction. It was they, if they responded to their collective local reality, who represented the new so-called ‘post-colonial’ national, and even international, culture. But this new progressively free direction was not really encouraged, or pursued officially from 1966 onward.

However, this direction had been successfully pursued by numerous outstanding artists in their fields, including certain instrumental musical groups from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, such as ‘The Telstars’; ‘Combo 7’; ‘The Rhythmaires’; and ‘Bumble & The Saints’; specific writers like Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, A.J. Seymour, Martin Carter, and Sheik Sadeek; specific painters, like Aubrey Williams, Frank Bowling, Stanley Greaves, Michael Leila, Cletus Henriques, Dudley Charles, Carl Martin, Keith Khan, George Simon, Ohene Koama, and myself.
Also the outstanding sculptor/painter Omowale Lumumba.

Taken together, no group of artists could be more diverse in their generic styles, yet representing a singular progressive Guyanese cultural direction from an evolving cosmopolitan local reality, rather than diverse cultural imitations of inherited ethnic realities in Guyana.

A FLAWED ENCYCLOPEDIA

In 2000, an opportunity to present definitive evidence of Guyanese culture as a progressive cosmopolitan reality was offered by a large book titled: ‘Encyclopedia of Latin American & Caribbean Art’, published in Britain by an imprint of Oxford University Press.

Not surprisingly, the task of presenting a summary of Guyana’s achievements in the Visual Arts, fell to Denis Williams, a British-educated intellectual who left British Guiana in the 1950s to receive his art education in England, and whose two novels, though innovatively written, and paintings, though academically correct, had little influence from both the social or geographic reality of Guyana, including its South American continent.

It was no doubt Williams’ prior educational connection to Britain in many ways which merited his election to write such a summary of Guyana’s artistic achievements, when in reality two other well-informed intellectuals and insightful local art critics, the late Basil Hinds, and journalist Rashid Osman, would have been quite capable of such a task. In fact, Williams had done the pen and ink illustrations for Michael Swan’s 1957 book: ‘British Guiana: The Land of…’.

In that book Swan’s statement that: “Most of the painters appeared to be of African origin, and although their immediate inspiration was European…the paintings…seemed to have their origin in the atavisms of race”, definitely appeared to be echoed by Williams’ summary of what topic concerns Guyanese art.

MISSING VITAL INFORMATION

Apart from Williams’ generally accurate précised notes on Guyanese history and architecture, his writing in this encyclopedia about Guyanese contemporary painting from the 1970s onward, is quite misleading and erroneous. Some of these errors concern myself (whose name he spells his own way) a younger colleague, whom he often mistakenly thought was estranged from Guyanese society like he said he was, because like his immigration to England, I too had immigrated to metropolitan Toronto. However, nothing of the sort was my case; since I, like other local artists, especially Cletus Henriques, Carl Martin, Omowale Lumumba, and Desmond Alli, had also lived nearby in tropical creolized Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Central America, whose contemporary Art and its relation to Guyana, Williams admitted he knew little about, since his academic training and interests had been entirely molded by Britain and Africa.

Subsequently missing from his encyclopedic report is the name and outstanding achievement of the late Cletus Henriques, one of Guyana’s most significant and progressive contemporary painters (indeed, he was Williams’ Guyanese Arts Council assistant), and also innovative sculptor/painter Winston Strick.

EXPRESSIONOVA & WILLIAMS

Denis Williams, like many who have heard of ‘Expressionova’, a legendary group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, films, fusion jazz, and recited poetry I organised on a visit to Guyana in 1974, was more affected by rumor, not facts. In fact he never consulted me prior to his written report on Expressionova in the fat encyclopedia, and his segment about it is mostly incorrect, and also repeated in two British books on himself, in which Expressionova is called ‘European influenced’, which is total nonsense. Contrary to his report, the name Expressionova was not really taken from the Guyanese literary periodical ‘Expression’, founded by N.D. Williams, Milton Drepaul, and the British VSO teacher, Brian Cotton in the 1960s Georgetown, but was a progressive creative direction influenced by Brazilian Bossa Nova culture, and the avant-garde jazz album ‘Supernova’, by Afro-American tenor/soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Neither was Expressionova a ‘nationalist’ group, but cosmopolitan oriented individual artists, as its catalogue states. Neither was my painting ‘The Birth of Guyana’ (NOT ‘The Birth of Roraima’) in the exhibition; nor does that painting juxtapose the Taj Mahal to Guyana, as Williams claims, but re-arranges elements of the Guyanese landscape into a cosmic unity beyond race, or historical domination. Its overall design is the unified Oriental symbol of Yin & Yang in an imaginative Guyanese landscape setting. Neither does Omowale Lumumba’s sculptures and paintings represent an “unstudied Afro-Guyanese aesthetic”, despite his name, but rather the profound influence of Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ figurative imagery,(an artist all the Expressionova artists were fascinated by because of an uncanny resemblance to Guyanese moods), as well as the Surrealistic antecedents in pre-Columbian South American art. Neither was any English poetry read at Expressionova, but rather the South American poetry of Nicanor Parra of Chile, Octavio Paz of Mexico, and my Guyanese/South American inspired verse.
For the Expressionova artists, their works neither represented “book art” or any racial aesthetic, but rather an informed, educational, and intelligent cosmopolitan aesthetic.

By Terence Roberts

Denis Williams, like many who have heard of ‘Expressionova’, a legendary group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, films, fusion jazz, and recited poetry I organised on a visit to Guyana in 1974, was more affected by rumor, not facts.