IN THE peculiar circumstances of developing countries, where numerous people in professional fields have to study and make a professional living abroad, it comes as no surprise that the countries they are related to by birth, or immigrant ancestral relations, find ways to claim their dormant or obscure association.
A new batch of such Guyanese-related artistes, some of extreme popularity, such as young musical hit-makers, Rihanna and Leona Lewis, and the screen actor, Sean Patrick Thomas have recently emerged. But what of visual artists? Recently, young 17-year-old Ashia Britton, born in the USA of Guyanese parents, came to Guyana for a brief holiday with her parents and brought along about a dozen of her works, which were part of her graduation portfolio at the Sharron Art Centre in New Jersey, which she attended.
Usually, when cultural journalists like myself are contacted to look into the works of all sorts of potential or budding artists, or even some thought by others to be good, they are wary of the hunt for publicity without any meritorious reason. But meeting and seeing the works of young Ashia did not disappoint.
Of course, a lot of the work was of realistic imagery in graphite pencil and coloured crayons, as this is the approach that Art as a convention, rather than an exploration, has long been based upon.
However, even in this familiar area, Ashia already displays a slight shift out of this typical conventional focus, which shows the potential for a future style of her own.
If an artist does not, or cannot spot this spark of a direction in their own development, they can lose it by sheer distraction or fickleness.
At present, Ashia already has the ability to do commissioned illustrations for magazines and books. The problem is that except for such venues still specializing in high quality original graphics, her talent would be encouraged to join the popular thirst for computerized digital graphics. In fact, Ashia admits she has an interest in such graphics as it applies to billboard art, which, in metropolitan cultures of quality, such as the USA, Canada, Italy, Brazil, Hong Kong, and Japan, is still allowed much space for individual innovation.
Ashia also admits a liking for Andy Warhol’s art, and, of course, this is expected since Warhol still wields enormous influence on America’s young as an exciting Pop artist. However, some of her work shows a closer affinity to another of America’s greatest Pop artists, Roy Lichtenstein; in my opinion, a far more interesting and exciting Fine Artist because of his maintenance of a raw, bold manual dexterity and a brilliant respect for comic-book graphics.
Regardless of all the new art processes of today, with an eye to selling all sorts of products commercially, to which young artists can be seduced for functional economic success and mass acceptance in the job market, a large part of the pleasure and prestige in being an artist in any genre, whether painting, sculpture, assemblage, creative writing, film, drama, music, etc, remains in pursuing an individual course which finds and explores new, unusual, and interesting form and content.
Ashia will have to consider this, the earlier the better, since apart from commercial success, the Arts serve another satisfying human and social need, which is to renew the viewers’ senses and mental response by presenting it with stimulation and contemplation, via works which cannot be understood and consumed routinely, then ignored.
Art advances, or progresses, by an internal process, not simply by external technical processes devoid of human questions. Art becomes stale and routine when its forms are seen as familiar conventions following the same paths over and over again, thereby creating the false impression that it is merely a learned skill of repetition, even though it is also important that we do not forget such skill.
The importance of the individual artist is, however, based on the individual power to produce a new response by surprising the audience with fresh form and content. In fact, it is the individual artist who changes the whole of art, then other artists begin to follow, and a popular style emerges; until that is changed, again by other individual insertions of fresh adjustments to the tradition that art inevitably becomes over time. Art looses its powers of persuasion when its forms become instantly familiar, thereby offering nothing more than a reflection of known platitudes.
Ashia showed two works which reveal a promising individual touch in vision and construction. One is a landscape in which coloured crayons create an unusual and arresting raw, nervous rendering of nature, not as picturesque escape, but as subconscious effect.
It succeeds because of the freedom in drawing, the freedom of colours chosen, which do not imitate nature but add to its human response.
The other work is a figurative, non-Western image, or portrait, which gathers up tropical cultural references around it in an innovative use of abstract form and monochromatic  tones.
There is much individual promise here for a 17-year-old, and also the evidence that art is lodged within her as more than an acquired technical skill, but as an ancestral and subconscious relationship to a land, Guyana, that has long been known to exert enormous imaginative and even mystical influence of those who encountered it, native or foreign.
It will be interesting to see her future works of art down the road, and those in Guyana should see it too. I, at least, will look forward to it.