We see far too little Caribbean painting in Britain. John Henshalldiscovers just what we've been missing
Britain does very badly when it comes to exhibitions of Caribbean art. If we average one show every other year from a region which is a fulcrum of aesthetic activity, we are doing extremely well. This makes "The Elders", which brings to this country Brother Everald Brown and Stanley Greaves, two of the biggest names in an area full of first-rate artists, all the more important. If this show goes some way towards righting a dismal situation - Brown has exhibited here only once before, nearly 15 years ago, and Greaves has never had a solo showing - a small army of people will not have worked in vain.
It has been a very long, hard slog for these shining talents. While both men were exhibiting in their own localities from their twenties onwards, Brown, who is 82 this year, only participated in his first major show in Kingston, Jamaica, at the age of 51. Greaves, who is 64, waited until he was nearly 40 for his first big exhibition, Brazil's Sao Paulo biennale. If artists this gifted had grown up in Europe or the USA, then whether they were black, white or sky blue pink, they would have been feted long before they were 30.
Brown is a deeply religious seer and mystic from the mountain hamlet of St Ann, Jamaica, and is essentially a self-taught outsider artist. However, across the Caribbean, with the possible exception of Haiti, such painters prefer the term "intuitive". Greaves grew up in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana (that strip of a republic on the north-eastern seaboard of South America), now lives in St Michael, Barbados, and is a surrealist. Unlike Bwon, he likes to be styled a metaphysical artist as well. It is always heartening when people agree on basic terminologies. Greaves admires Europeans such as Ernst, Magritte and de Chirico but, perhaps inevitably, his moody, symbolic work has strong undertones of black central Americas' kaleidoscopic culture, both magical and menacing, as its uncompromising backdrop.
The exhibition is not called "The Elders" simply because of these men's seniority as makers of marvellous art. Rather, its instigators pay tribute to the vast reservoir of visual and allegorical experience they have accumulated, testament to the status of Caribbean art as a hip, zany ziggurat, just as able to produce "greats" as the longer established, more stratified art world here.
Everald Brown grew up in lush, green hill country. His ancestry was predominantly African and his father was a bee-keeper who practised traditional medicine. Music rocked his homestead, and when Brown became a carpenter, he made exquisite instruments, including delicately decorated harps, flutes and drums. Brown followed the rastafarianism of L P Howell and Joseph Hibbert, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He founded his own church, the Assembly of the Living, as an outpost of the faith. He read the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey and, like many a pastor in the American deep South, ministered to black working people often living through hell on earth and praying for better in heaven.
Brown began to experience visions, or "travels" as he calls them: on one, he accepted the "divinity" of Haile Selassie, then emperor of Ethiopia. Brown believed he was taken to mystical realms, to return and express through his art the marvels, messages and "truths" he had seen. His travels prompted key works such as Bush Have Ears (1976), in which the plants, huts and rocks around his mountain home assume an energetic anthropomorphism: faces, figures and fancies peer, peep and leer from everything in sight. His Mystical Hills (1979) also salutes the African pantheistic beliefs that were his inheritance, spiced with "livity" - the rasta term for pizzazz. His message is that there can be no secrets from nature or the gods.
Stanley Greaves did receive an art school education. He went from the Working People's Art Class in Bridgetown to Newcastle University when pop art and David Hockney were du jour and Richard Hamilton was chief tutor. Greaves felt pop art to be quite alien to him. He felt alien himself as he sought to develop his aesthetic in a north-eastern England where Geordies still built ships, mined coal and walked tall. Greaves completed his training at Howard University in Washington, DC. Both Brown and Greaves have always taught art. Greaves also loves music. He painted his father, "Sweetie" Greaves, with his Old Time String Band in a deadpan poster format that hints at wonderful sounds and unbridled enjoyment.
Greaves is a surrealist who functions as a social realist. His material is the dirt-poor working population of the self- consciously Uncle Sammified Caribbean orbit. Works such as Weeding Gang (1962) and the lattice-rhythmed Cane Cutters (1977) chronicle labour, poverty and popular religion. Later he drew on European cubist regimens to paint abstract compositions where entirely unrelated objects are held together by sheer strength of composition.
It was natural for Greaves to move from painting the people to depicting the politicians who sought to control them. His politicians often appear as natty hucksters who, tellingly, prefer to stand and rant in trash cans rather than declaim from rostrums. They wear ludicrous stars and stripes hats and wave disembodied microphones like maracas. They present themselves as regular guys who will keep their compatriots in order. An outstanding example is The Annunciation (1993), whose garbage-can motif says: these demagogues have little to say and less to offer; their promises are as empty as the dustbins from which they declaim.
Other politicians, even more deadbeat and devious, are shown as dogs. The mulatto mutt in Party Political Broadcast (1997) brooks no half measures. He is the consummate politician who can even walk on overhead power lines. To keep the Middle Caribbean sweet, he wears an old school tie of sorts. He might go far in a particular kind of politics. He would come cheaply, too. Whoever heard of a dog who needed a spin-doctor?
For all the travails and hardships of the post-colonial world that Brown and Greaves depict, there is happiness and exuberance. One recent visitor to Brown's mountain eyrie says: "When he starts talking, it is as if there are no clouds, no problems. There is a joy that springs out to engulf you . . ." No wonder Brother Everald's mesmeric visions frequently seem to be pure trips of painted ecstasy.
"The Elders" is at the South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, London SE5 (0171-703 6120) until 11 April, then tours to the Wolsey Art Gallery, Christchurch Mansion, Christchurch Park, Ipswich, Suffolk (01473 253246) from 17 April until 30 May. Both venues are closed on Mondays
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