The artist’s place

Donald Jackie Hinkson

It is a great honour for me to address you today, particularly you graduands.

An artist friend of mine, also a painter, was at a social function and was approached by a gentleman from one of the highly regarded professions who asked him “what do you do?”

My artist colleague replied, “I am an artist.”

The professional persisted.

“No, what do you really do?”

“I paint and I draw and I also produce sculpture.”

The response: “No, what do you really, really do?”

The social relevance of the artist is not as readily acknowledged as that of the other established professions and in fact, even within the arts, the relevance of the visual artist is not as widely understood as, for example, the calypsonians, the novelist, the filmmaker, etc.

During my 50 years as a practising artist, a significant part of my output has been produced plein air, that is, outdoors in front of the subject. So I have had the opportunity to experience firsthand the impact of my calling and my work in real time on the man on the street. I wish to share with you some of these outdoor experiences and invite you to reflect on what these experiences reveal about the artist’s place in society.

Somewhere around 1980 I was painting on Jackson Hill in Laventille and a man passed by on one of those old-time Raleigh bicycles. He stopped and observed me in silence. After a long time he climbed back on the Raleigh and as he rode away I heard him muttering to himself, “boy dat is education, dat is education.”

Not long after, this time in the John John area, I had another experience that has remained with me. It was a blistering hot day, and I wanted to do a drawing of a wooden roadside house. I approached its open window and called out to a man who I could see silhouetted inside.

“Excuse me, I am an artist and I want to know if it is okay to make a drawing of your house?”

Before I could finish, without turning to face me the man indicated with a gesture that I should wait. I grew uneasy. I knew from experience that people can be sensitive about having outsiders enter their space. Eventually, without looking at me again he gestured for me to go ahead. I returned to the midday heat of the pavement and proceeded, nervously at first. Some 30 minutes into my work, the man emerged and made his way towards me. Without a word, he opened an umbrella to shade me from the sun. We eventually began talking, and even had a drink in the nearby rum shop. He told me about his life, the scar on his face and the bullet wound on his upper chest where said he’d been shot by the police.

But I have also had experiences of a different type. While working in a fishing village in the Grenadines one day, I was suddenly approached by a man from the village who picked up one of my valuable sable-hair brushes and asked, “what you go do if I mash up this brush?”

I was stunned by the unexpected aggression and felt threatened. I wondered why someone would adopt such an attitude towards an innocuous looking artist. I have never had an answer for it but I did escape by calling his bluff. I replied with a serious face and a controlled voice, “Well, there’s only one way to find out.” He withdrew with a nervous laugh. Of course, if he had raised a finger I would have been the first to duck.

Even more difficult to accept, was the anger and suspicion of a man who approached me in a rural village. He observed me in the early stages of a painting when I was building my composition in fragments, a shape here a shape there. I suppose that the fragments seemed to bear little relationship to the subject before me and he exploded, “You think you could fool people so easily? My little children could paint better than that!”

His fury was genuine and he stormed off.

Conversely, I had an experience in a coastal village in Dominica where under almost exactly the same circumstances I was being observed by a barefoot villager on a windy day. After quite a while, as the watercolour easel (with my flat picture base clipped on to a tripod base), shifted in the wind, he asked me in his patois accent, “How you balance it?” Assuming that he was referring to the unsteadiness of the painting surface, I explained that the design of the tripod base makes it more stable than it appears. He looked slightly puzzled, pointed directly to the painting, and said, “No, this. How you balance it?”

Only then did I realize that he was expressing an appreciation of my process of building the composition.

Appreciation and acknowledgement can also come from unexpected places and sometimes they can be clouded with other notions of art and culture.

One morning I was painting outdoors and set up just outside a traditional village primary school, close enough so that I could hear the teachers’ voices in the classroom. One voice stood out more than the others because of the speaker’s somewhat pedantic style. Suddenly someone walked out the school door, saw me and said, “Oh, an artist! Wonderful!”

It was the voice of the very teacher. I smiled. She said, “What are you doing here? You should be in Italy, France or one of those places.”

“Well, I like it here,” I said.

She looked at my makeshift palette, which was in fact a cupcake baking pan and she said, “Oh, that’s an interesting weasel.”

She had made two mistakes: 1. Calling an easel a weasel and 2. Thinking that the palette was an easel. I knew that people were often not familiar with artists’ equipment. Wishing to gently correct her, I pointed directly at my easel and said, “Yes, this is a watercolour EASEL,” at which point, she looked startled.

“Oh,” she said, “I guess the W is silent!”

As much as I would like to find deep meaning in all my plein air experiences there are some that are simply amusing.

I enjoyed a brief moment of illustriousness when I was painting in a quiet corner of Arnos Vale in Tobago. I noticed a taxi pull up on the main road. A woman tourist came out and approached me. Finally working up the courage she asked, “Are you Cazabon?”

I laughed out loud.

“I hope not,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he has been dead over 100 years now.”

“Oh,” she recovered, “You could be his grandson.”

I am grateful for the experiences I’ve had as an artist, and however reluctant I may be to interpret them, I have never doubted the validity of the artist. The functional relevance of the astonishing Stone Age drawings of animals done some 17 thousand years ago at a time when hunting was crucial for survival, is obvious. But they also have a more enduring value, for in the sensitive depiction of the animals, particularly of the noble dying bison, the cave artist has communicated to his public deeper insights into life, insights that move us to this day.

I wish to end by saying that the fact that the region’s most influential educational institution has chosen to confer on Mr. Roy Cape and me this high honour is proof of the important role that UWI has played and continues to play in expanding our understanding of the value that all creative artists may bring to a society.

I had the pleasure of talking with fellow honoree Mr. Cape about his tales as a wide-travelling musician and encourage you to seek him out if you want some exciting stories.

I am sure that you graduands in the Arts, the Humanities, Education, will have thought-provoking and challenging experiences, not unlike ours. Having benefited from the vision of UWI and your experiences here may you go on to add to the richness of your country and the region.