THE MOST COMPLEX FACULTY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES IS THE INCREDIBLE GIFT OF ART

MOST of our ancient art has now, over the past three centuries, moved from the realm of suspicion and hauntings to the inspiring and enlightening archives of our human memory, defining, in some cases, the world those ancestors lived in, tens of thousands of years ago. To those ancient artists, we owe the archives of recognising that the Sahara was not always a desert. The rock paintings of the ‘Sahara Desert’ cast a human presence on a world where huge animals grazed amidst grass and trees, some time before 7,000 BC. The expression of ancient graphic art and sculpture exists wherever humans settled and have materialised, some in greater abundance than others. But the oldest published, recorded sculpted artworks and art-related items to date were found in North and South Africa, in areas currently known as Israel, Morocco and South Africa, dating as far back as 265.000 to 75,000 years ago. A most interesting find lies in France, called ‘the Ice Age Lascaux Cave’ dated as 17,000 years ago, and then there is surprisingly the figure from Germany’s Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave of a part man and Lion, that is dated as 40,000 years old. See National Geographic’s- August 1987, October 1988 and January 2015.

What is incredible is when we can attach a name to a dispensation of art and architecture, when a man’s contributions compel his countrymen to attribute symbolic godhood to him. Such a man is the enigmatic ‘Imhotep’ from some 2,950 years BC of the land of Khemet [Egypt] known to his countrymen as physician, Artist-Architect, mystic and Philosopher, credited as a humble man of incredible talents. It would have been such a mind that conceived of the merge of nature in architecture, producing the columns that incorporated the symbolic imagery of deities, lotus and other plant motifs, possibly the first to design individual panels for ceilings, that today we know as ceramic tiles. Not all the designers of ancient temples and palaces are handed down to us by name. We know of the incredible custodians of that ancient tradition who kept it alive in Greece through Khemet and later in 16th-century European manuscript illustrations and the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The anatomy explorations and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci took the concept of rendering the human figure to a different and direct realistic level. Leonardo must also be credited as a designer of military machines, architecture and defence fortifications.

Statues that were created to depict gods and great leaders were always coveted hostages and trophies of war in the ancient world and symbolically destroyed even in our current era. In the conflict between Kush and Rome, it was the matter of stolen sacred statues between the two forces that led to the table of negotiations. The greatest pillage of art and creative items can be attributed to the modern age of European colonisation. What so far can be understood, is the value that is placed on creative talents and skills, by the nations who aspire to excellence and perceive themselves as owing their countrymen the best through museums and redefinitions of the ‘national being’ as the custodians of man’s foremost gift, through a stream of published volumes and commercial décor, and as the instructors of ‘Taste’.

But then, why not? Because it is based on choice and the unfair conditions created by invasion and its warfare, but subsequently, it is the breakdown and manipulation of values that allow mediocrity to rise, whether from city nation, village nation, or even industrialised nation; the onus rests upon the maturity in that area, with each nation to either unravel and redefine or seek comfort in passing heightened pedestrian comforts. Jamaica and then Guyana were the first CARICOM nations to establish Art schools. Jamaica has excelled, while Guyana struggles; no, we are not left behind. We have the talent, the vision, and the ‘will,’ but in the modern world we lack the structures. We do not have our own compatible intellectual fortress. Define the modern world in the context of the arts?

Trade and its arsenal of finished products, from vehicles to videos, the larger percentage rests with Creative design and Iconography, which identify and advertise the product. With entertainment, and edutainment, enticing realms in science are always open for the development of the tools and software required for the competitive expression of creative products. Where do we in Guyana, either way, stand?

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