Defining the arts in all their expressions, from its earliest recorded ages, have always transferred as storytelling records that allow us an insight into facts of life in that time. To belief and symbolic perceptions of its distinct age, some will remain a mystery, subject to our current imaginations, as have aspects of the Sahara rock drawings to the possibility of Alien visitors, etc. Throughout our recorded existence, whether with poetic heroic narratives, religious mythopoeia, love songs, poetry, ballad, or larger-than-life graphics on temple walls or columns, for those who have inherited those visuals and prose, we can choose to either empathise with or pity the humanity of that age, when we combine and interpret a time projection of their challenges, Guyana and its Arts are no different.

This article was prompted by an article published in Kaieteur news on April 9, 2023, titled “Art is much more than a reflection of reality” under the pseudonym of ‘Peeping Tom’. I honestly despise pseudonyms for hiding while at times casting clueless and venomous opinions. That article, however, painted a picture of one who has insights into the arts but has not relied on this talent exclusively to survive.

I think that artists should source it, even as I invite this person to come forward as a real person, thus, the narrative of the first paragraph. Every artist has a significant role to play, the portrait painter for this first reference. I designed the backdrops for the Spectrum Night club at Tower Hotel at the request of the late, then-owner Richard Humphrey. I composed the backdrop screens, but when the top musician portraits were to be done, I called in my buddy ‘Ward’, an expert portrait painter to do his thing and we got paid because the ideal then is in the client’s satisfaction.
Secondly, in the initial teenage era of walking and selling paintings, while then employed at GRB, I wasn’t doing well until it was explained by Nunes and other peddling artists about the category of paintings that sold that were deemed ‘Co-op Bank paintings’. These were primarily interior river scenes with taunting sunsets or sunrises. “These accountants at the bank, can’t appreciate far out ideas banna, deh want a familiar interior landscape, cause de farest deh ever guh, is to the airport.” That was the concept that defined that landscape and artists have earned to live.

I can remember when I designed a graphic novel on the impact of drugs in underprivileged areas, with art to accompany the script, and photographs. I couldn’t get it published, no ads, not even from the people at the Ministry of Education. UNICEF was interested but got no cooperation. This was the mid-early 1990s. I gave a friend, a former joint service officer who worked at the US embassy, to explore publishing help from the embassy. My friend called me about a week later and said that his boss said that he didn’t know that there were people in Guyana who saw things that way. However, he didn’t help. But my friend’s boss did become very ‘infamous’ on his Guyana tour of duty. It is well understood that art is supposed to propose deeper conversations, but with whom, about what, and at what cost? Nevertheless, some of us will pursue that philosophical passion, but an observer must carefully explore before such an analytical view can be shelved to posterity with honesty.

The ‘incognito pen’ then described the theatre as “The new label is popular theatre, where the audience goes to and does laugh at even tragedy. Popular theatre has become so ingrained, (possibly in satire) that even if today a serious production, treated with themes and a strong underlying moral, was to be produced, the audience would laugh at every line.

The problem is that the joke is on them. This is difficult to deny, and the theatre arts population, ‘we’ must address its values within the context that we survive in. It takes me back to the mid-1980s when I introduced the character of ‘The Elder’ in an illustrated story named ‘The Ornate Goblet.” A specific family in the arts wrote both Chronicle and Stabroek News, declaring that I was promoting an occult theme, while I should use my talent to “make people laugh”, the theme fitted into mystery adventure, the papers however, did ignore their letter but showed it to me.

The incognito person behind Pepping Tom who wrote that article drew an ironic class reference to the deep work of self-problem solving with two popular writers, both with commendable skill, both privileged in our colonial past, both tormented by inner self-loathing, one more than the other was enveloped by tragedy. We respond to Edgar Mittleholtzer and V.S Naipaul. They were, and we understand what the vexations of colonisation did more through them, though they still rest well with us in many ways. The resolve is that the predicament of the arts today is the quest for its freedom, to embody its true self, and to envisage how we will shape today for tomorrow from the portraits and sceneries that have shaped us.