My name is Steve Ouditt and my exhibition, Proceeds to Mental Health, is on at Medulla Gallery.I'm born and raised in St James. You're talking about a kind of urban young fella: we had running water, toilets inside, telephone, TV, parks and paved roads. I didn't have to tie no goat and cow.
I love St James. Walking to the Oval and Harvard for cricket and football; Hosay, tassa drum; Roxy cinema; the mandir; the mosque; St Mary's Church; Tripolians panside; Power Stars; Third World; Starlift; Phase II; the barracks; the Poor House. Imagine growing up in that nexus! You didn't have a problem thereafter with foolishness like violence against same sex couples. You were hardwired to be progressive. So therefore imagine how shocking fundamentalisms - of religion, of race, of intermarriage–would have been to you.
Unfortunately, I live in St Augustine now. Because my day job at the University of the West Indies is there.I went to a government primary school: grim and foreboding. Half the wall is green oil paint, half is cream, and the third half is BRC. Scary. All these things haunt me and I wonder: where do you end up, if you lose your health, your sanity, your job, money, wife, child? How empathetic, how comforting –how decent–are we? To make you feel it's going to be all right if something like that happens to you? We're not civilised at all!
I knew from young I couldn't believe in God. I couldn't understand how watching a girl's bottom could be a sin. I'm happy to say my nephew is also atheistic. He's been saved.In art, creation doesn't come out of nothing, out of ashes or dust or whatever like in the scriptures. You make a script, a story, about what is before you: a phenomenon; a thought; a story; a person; an animal; a thing; the things you eat, the things you smell. You work with and out of that.
We didn't have art A'level. If somebody say they teaching you art, they was teaching you, "Still Life with Barbadine". I drive on the right side of the road. I don't cuss nobody, I don't beat nobody, I don't thief. I does lie now and again, but only to girls.You can make a leap from the geometry of the tattoos on my body to the geometry in my drawings and paintings.
Proceeds to Mental Health is not a show where you buy pretty works and go home and the transaction is finished: gallery gets its cut; artist gets his cut; you get your painting. I've never worked like that, and don't intend to. Hutch [Mount Hope Head of Psychiatry, Professor Gerard Hutchinson] and I have been friends for a long time and wanted to do something that would have some deep social meaning.
A man could sing filth, like, "A man dig two grave and put he kaaki in he kaaka hole". The State will support that crap. He could make millions of dollars. But, if your daughter want to be a ballerina, forget that, Horse! Even if nobody don't actually kick you out they house, you as an artist, writer, thinker or even atheist, are not wanted in certain places. You are not part of this conversation.
The best thing about doing this work was when Minsh (masman Peter) Minshall) looked at some of the drawings and said, "Oh, Gord, Ouditt! Doing this work better than sex, eh!" The bad was I had to take big breaks because of the day job.If I were building nasty doghouses for people in Woodbrook, where people would live like nasty dogs and not talk to each other, not even a blade of grass growing, banks would line up to lend me the money for that.
There are many Trinis. Some smart, some really stoopid. For me, the trick is to avoid the really stoopid ones.
When people describe a Trini as a feter and limer, that is real embarrassing. I would like to be a Trini who reads, enjoys conversation and is not into any fundamental bull...Music from Zandolee, Spoiler and Rudder. Writing like BC Pires, Raymond Ramcharitar, Naipaul and Walcott. Art like Minshall, Chris (Cozier), Eddie (Bowen). That is the kinda Trini I want to be. Not the stoopid, ignorant, loud, vacuous, loutish, vacant Trini.
Trinidad & Tobago, to me, is a place of incredible opportunity. Because so many things are wrong and bad about it, there's a lot of good work to be done.
�2Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com