THE University of Guyana joined the artistic community of Guyana and the Caribbean to acknowledge the loss of painter and anthropologist George Simon, one of the great artists of the contemporary era.

The University, in a recent press release, noted that the institution commiserates with Simon’s widow and immediate family, while recognizing, at once, that this untimely vacuum is equally felt in a much wider circle: the University itself, the Guyanese nation and the institutions in the international community among whom his work and influence were significant.

George Simon was a painter extraordinaire, a conceptualist in artistic theory, an archaeologist, anthropologist, researcher and lecturer in whom reposed an innate consciousness, shaped by a conceptual vision, that drove and made limitless, the frontiers of the art of the Indigenous presence in Guyana. A great part of this continuing contribution was realised during his distinguished tenure at the University of Guyana. This partnership started humbly when he was recruited as a part-time lecturer in Art in the Division of Creative Arts.

He later served as a full member of the Faculty of Education and Humanities as Lecturer in the Fine Arts and research in the Amerindian Research Unit and being, at one time, its Coordinator. George’s service to the nation was outstanding. He earned degrees in both art and archaeology, but was a student of the legendary Denis Williams, with whom he worked widely in the field and at the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, in mapping the pre-history of the Guianas. Most recently, he represented the University of Guyana as part of a team with English-American professor Neil Whitehead in partnership with the University of Wisconsin, the national Department of Culture and the UG, investigating the recently discovered agricultural mounds off the Upper Berbice River, unleashing the mysteries of an ancient Guyanese community more than 5,000 years old. That service to nation building, however, was to multiply itself several times in the boundless advancements in the field of art. Simon was born in St. Cuthbert’s Mission on the Mahaica River, where he benefited from scholarships organized by priests for his studies in England. But he was to repay that patronage by training and motivating groups of young artists in his native village as well as at the ER Burrowes School of Art.

He organized and led the Lokono Artists who rapidly soared to national prominence at the helm of new developments in a branch of Guyanese art that is older than Columbus, but suffered centuries of colonial submersion before its gradual resurgence in the twentieth century. George Simon was a major protagonist in theories of Amerindian art in the Caribbean.

The importance of this innovator to Guyanese art is well celebrated. He was a part of that area of art characterized by inter-textuality. The visual arts and literature engage each other in analysis and interpretation of Guyanese society through paintings by Bernadette Persaud, Stanley Greaves which interrogate the works of Martin Carter and Edgar Mittelholzer. Simon’s preoccupations have engaged Wilson Harris and Pauline Melville to reinforce a development that deepened the power of Simon’s art and of Amerindian art, which included excursions into the rainforest, animism, spiritual beliefs, mythology, the landscape, the grotesque and the Kanaima.

Simon was to probe even further forward with his explorations of shamanism and the mythology of other societies such as Haiti, Chad, and the Sudan; then most recently Mexico and Spain.

This painter and intellectual has made his mark indelibly on the Turkeyen Campus of the University with the famous mural “Palace of the Peacock: Homage to Wilson Harris” (2009) painted jointly with Philbert Gajadhar and Anil Roberts. However, that is but a replica of the impact on the art and consciousness of the nation. The similar stamp he imposed on the Caribbean region is captured in one of his most prominent marks of recognition – the Anthony Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence which he gained in 2012. The nation honoured him with the Arrow of Achievement (AA). Yet, the power of his art and the infinite breadth of his imagination have imposed their influence upon the art of the twenty first century, rendering them an immortal ingredient in the making of humanity.