In the intervening weeks between our conversation in mid-November focused on the Old House series and our follow-up fully two months later, Dudley Charles and I engaged in very fluid discussions on art in Guyana and circumstances for artists. Although physically distant, he is attuned with what is going on enough to keep me abreast of things. As we chatted, he told me of an encounter with Denis Williams [b. 1923, d. 1998]. Denis was instrumental in founding the Walter Roth Museum and the Museum of African Heritage, the E.R Burrowes School of Art and Castellani House.
DC: As I was working on the old house series, Denis Williams would come around and he’d look. He wouldn’t say anything, he would just look. Then one day he was looking at a painting and he said, “Why are you trying to analyse? You are getting too analytical.” I didn’t say anything. I just listened but he was right. I was thinking about colour and things, trying to do this and that. So, I had to stop and look.
AM: Was there anything else about what you were doing that caused you to agree with him?
DC: My first image, Image Old House, Aubrey Williams saw me painting and he said to me don’t spoil it now. And I didn’t understand what he meant. I couldn’t understand what he meant because I thought I had a lot more to do. Then I realised he meant to do a # 1, a #2, and a #3 … do a series. Because I was looking at the structure – the buildings, they have a structure and they have a history. They tell a story. The carpenters who worked on them have a story.
AM: So, in doing the work you wanted to capture the entirety of the story of the building – its structure, history, and human stories? To do all in one image would be too much.
DC: Yes. Otherwise, I would force it. And then you see in Guyana at the time you had people who were writing. You had Basil Hinds, for instance, who would write about parts of the work and help you to look. He wasn’t necessarily analysing things. But Denis was the only person who would… what Denis said, (he chuckled), he was right.
AM: This is after he had gone to Tanzania and returned?
DC: Yes. Even when Denis came back from England they couldn’t understand his work. They thought that it was scribbles. I think they expected him to continue like how he was working before he had left… doing landscapes like Sharples and E R Burrowes. But Denis’s strength was in his drawing. He was also a powerful painter. If you look at the mural in the Cultural Centre, and there is another in a church but I don’t remember the name …look at the power of the drawing.
AM: I like that mural [Memorabilia, 1976]. I kinda think it is in the wrong location. I tend to see it for its message. The message within it is so very political and it contrasts with the light kinds of entertainment that tends to happen in the space behind it. It’s there and people just seem to see it as a nice backdrop to their pictures.
DC: Yes, I was about to say that.
(We chatted about how little is known about Denis Williams’s work in Guyana and that this is reflected in most, if not all, of the early-generation artists. What little is known is fragmented and scattered. There is a need to amass the bits into single sources.)
AM: What impresses me about your generation of artists is that there seemed to have been a real cohesion and a collaborative spirit. [I am thinking about past conversations.] You worked together well in the past and still do to this day; you support each other. What do you suppose accounts for that?
DC: Donald [Locke] had his group, Group 67. [In a previous conversation the group was incorrectly referred to as Art 67.] And a few of us would meet and talk but outside of that we didn’t see each other. We would meet up at exhibitions. I think there was a force in Burnham’s independence speech. I think the whole idea of the country becoming independent, and the celebrations moved us. I think we were also moved by questions about who we were. We went from singing, “God save the Queen” to singing about the land of the Mighty Roraima… the jaguars, the land Sir Walter Raleigh came searching for – El Dorado. Then he went back to England and the Queen put him in jail.
(We both chuckled and I admitted I didn’t know what became of Raleigh.)
AM: Your Old House series dates to the 1970s. What were you doing before that, especially around independence?
DC: I was doing work like the image you saw at Castellani.
(I knew he was referring to an image of his that I stumbled on in the third-floor gallery of Castellani House in February 2020. Not a landscape of expansive land and swaying coconut trees, but one showing the view from the landing of an old wooden house looking into the yard and across fences at other simple wooden houses. The picture was lovely. It was also a routine treatment of the subject, unassuming, and absolutely unexpected for the painter of the inventive Old House images. Standing in the Gallery, I called him immediately and told him I had a surprise. Indeed, he was surprised. He had not seen the painting since the early 1970s.)
DC: I was painting landscapes like those I would see in the books. But after ’66, the JFK Library came into existence and that opened things to the wider arts so we were able to see what was happening in America and what African-American artists were doing. Apart from that, I questioned myself. I was looking at the English and French painters but I wasn’t seeing myself in their work. I liked their landscapes and their techniques but I wasn’t seeing myself – my story, reflected in their work. I knew my story and I wanted to see my story.
In 1970, I started working on my Image: Old House. Doing a bit of watercolour and so on. So, I started thinking about the times, the spaces, the stories that would go with them… like people would say the manager’s wife would come walking, although she was long gone. You know, the old people would tell us these stories and our heads would fill up with our own imagination. They would tell us stories about the overseer riding a white horse.
(His recall of the stories amused him and we chuckled. I also thought about long-ago blackout nights, long before cellular phones and data plans which perhaps have wiped away the storytelling tradition. We chatted a bit more before life interrupted. We promised to chat another day. Indeed. We need to talk about Anansi Stories. I have a sense of politics in those stories.
Closing off our conversation on the Old House series, I am thinking about the importance of receiving feedback on one’s work, intergenerational exchanges, and pushing one’s boundaries and experimenting. I am thinking of the importance of looking. Looking at what and how others are making and assessing one’s production against what one sees from others. These actions have clearly characterised Dudley Charles’s practice. It paid off. I think about the feedback I have received and how I grew. I think about younger artists. Are they getting feedback? I am not talking about pats on the shoulder only. Are they receiving feedback when given? If the feedback is given but not received there is no consequence.
Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist, art historian, and educator.
