With the turning there is little or no evidence that maturity is being easily acquired amongst our artist (I am specifically dealing with painters, sculptors, carvers, collagists). As if it were unnoticeable, a poisonous vine of jealousy, envy, and inferiority � a tragic infantilism plagues the greens of our potential to be more than what we are.
Not only on the inner sides where those who are by some dint of grace commanded to act, but, also from the outside where community should be an attempt at sustaining and consecrating the arts, there is so much scampish conduct and its inadequacies, that the creative is cowered in dread; deaf to any urgings at building a society, all is a wilt of any virtue, miraculously left us.
Here and now in the mix of self-hate and self-denial, any imaginable plot is well fed to ensure catastrophe, for which politics, as it is conceived, may well be the herald but it is the arts in its virtual absence that is the measured coffin's exalt.
There is serious squabbling among ourselves and our "masters" (steups!) as we try to synchronise old ruins with new ones... Result: Aesthetics is born from anxiety, while shunning the virtuous efficacies of the imagination. This provincial paranoia is producing the best it can, safe on the periphery by way of commercials, glossy muscles, short-legged stammering, half-bred schisms and so on. Pity what we call art and artists.
A far cry it is away from a form of conduct that may only be reached through contemplation and its discoveries that would transcend mere existence, showing ways to crucial dimensions now open to deepened quests that can provide a justified field, and leisure for knowing-knowing-know what is already known, however, at the same time entering upon, but barely, the mysterious precincts of hidden knowledge �our challenge.
The tragic-ness of the space of our art never connotes that something has been retrieved from either the past or the future. Enrichment by way of meaningful engagement of the present, is denied; thus herded, our so-called artist is quickened to worship fashionable temporality: were it dust, a line threading the eye of a take-out joint.
The present achieves an unwilling irony, distrust is filial; desolation deepens and a painted-on laughter repeats itself failing to hide the hurt they feel when the blades of their honest teeth slice their bridled tongues.
On the follow, needless to say, are our youth who have had no instructive time to discard their toys and doodling before facing up to those compelling and more critical challenges of the space before them. They go wild untrained in the drawing of breath, a-wash in mindlessness; fake and mimicry right across the board to formulae suited the deepening appetites of convulsive philistinism.
But among us is the arrival of the painstaking propositions of a brood-laden Prodigal � a classical portrait of a centurion Negro, folkloric, fret to his Banjo–whose mission it would seem is not to be assigned to elaborate on defunct conventions that suit our mundane accomplishments, but rather, as heir apparent to Maestro Elders: Leo Basso and Leo Warner, follows the road of unamenable premises that can only lead to grottoes of the obscured, from which, only the mediumistic emerges...risking all, even coherence, to see light and touch it.
They lurk there among us, personages of a defiant African lineage, clergical Sundays! Reminded of ordinations of the fetishistic Haitian Pantheon: Philom� Obin, Hector Hyppolite, Gerard Valcin and Georges Liautaud; Phillip Moore (Guyana) Kappo (Jamaica) arrives our Embah, unnoticed from the shadows, in native accordance, a spectre, personage of distances travelled, and like a cicada held to its vocables, palpitates with the deep, tonal interests of life, so maturely personified in the bark of old trees, that the ideal it is wont to share, while it coaxes our the hearth, its prerogatives are veiled in mystification.
Embah wants to tell us something important but it is inherently, extremely difficult for him to straddle those, our imperiously jealous zones; difficult to ply a syntax between sensibilities that have acquired outstanding character and those that are headstrong defectors from "de work" it would take to un-conceal the glow-worm of wording the Landscape of Consciousness � Obeah � from the abysmal spell of oblivion.
That this sense for juxtaposition of altercations between time and spatial indices, in order to draw our attention to signs that are entitled their release from our primordial instincts, emanates from an unshakeable faith that is elusive yet can be commendably realised. This did not come easy or just so, no, that he has worked hard at it, for it: starved between spit and sweat in an ideographic structuring of finger-print on finger-print until he had informed hands that can now only want to reach into the depths of human cause and being, may be incapable of our own adequacy of posture.
That in his attempts at juxtapositioning nature with mythology and spirit � invariably, our human limits can only convince us via our grasp of the psychical plane he has composed of fragments of wood, glass and daubs of paint and whatever else at hand �certainly there in a flirtation with a fourth space that is stubbornly held at bay by the more familiar cults of the third with their stops and starts and, how easy it is to be seduced by the grandeur of mediocrity, only to be caught in incoherence that denies fashionable exile.
How defiant he must be, not to be cajoled by those who profit from his mirroring of misery and its hymnal of victim hood, well apportioned to an identity he often relished at our doltish chiding. That of course, is not healthy. It is a dangerous road (ask RP) littered with soggy cigarette butts, empty flasks, and a sheetless piss-stained mattress under a heap of unfinished letters, sketches and newspapers that never carried his name...
Dare Embah to know that that is not art, no, it is surrender to self-denial, self-pity; in his deprecation that has increasingly salvaged a perverse fame and fortune from our sick but ecstatic mamaguying place.
Know him. Embah is such a kind, caring person. So generous with his concerns and the tales surrounding them that he may well be apt on any side � the folk hero! Ancient, gentle, rustic, forbidden he peers with round, steady surprise over the abyss of our troubled times seeking to unravel the riddles of the labyrinth of our discontent. A precise crisis with its levy of conundrums did not escape his concerns at Arting or Acting out his perceptions in accents of immediacy. Dead accoutrement of the "De Dis and De dat" will become haunting bits and pieces that dignified, even deified hysterical acculturations.
That we are swept away in a current of belligerence everywhere is no longer a speculation. Vanity-bound gods are falling down like rain everywhere. Termites of thought have found ways to eat-away-at, not only wood, but concrete and steel, causing foundations to crumble, and, it is through a rare breed of men, from way under our groundless nerves that the knell is sending up signals of new mythical formations that will be opposed to those that have held sway for far too long.
On encountering Embah's plots, our eyes, our ears want to return to their childhood games of hide-and-seek. Reality becomes a mercurial spell of see-me-now, see-me-not! The trained mind is sabotaged, is footlessly plumbed in mute formations that tempt the virtuous to idolatry.
The contact here is with runaways, �migr�s, refugees, castaways too, spirits of unrested ancestors that shake our psychic realms. A delinquent eye has taken over the compass of our sensibilities, stalled in recycled, abbreviated exercises.
We see. We wonder how deliberate are these disdainful objects of vagrancy when reset in the fallen crown of virtues that used to deliver effort to the realm of art. Or, are they impulses that have no power to break through the ceilings of slogan to hold their own on the outside of gibberish and hallucinatory smoke.
Perhaps these are signifiers, signs that have not finally left us, and, which still have the power to remind us of some thing we barely remember. Flawed, as they must be in the parable of change, these objects invite our imagination to lay pursuit that will guarantee an initiation into spheres of their existence that are essential to ongoing creation.
Framed Ghettos! Who wants to live in any ghetto, be it in Goodwood Park, in Lavantee, in Carenage, "Behind the Bridge," in church or casino behind gated communities in Maraval in Cascade, Mt Hopefuls in Duncan Street... Who want to live in the Sea-Lottoed minds that Volvo or Mercedes or BMW's down into Halls of Justice up through Parliament CEO franchises and other Friendlier Societies of throat-cutting banquets of gripe...Portage to the inner innards of vagrancy?
Framed ghettos! Vagrancies gathered in his experiment are the very images of our dangerously disparate lives that he wishes to reconcile with those of finer possibilities. Discarded objects are remade to mirror us. Objectified in the artist's re-classifying hands, their objectivity often eludes us. That they stun us is softened by Embah's goodness and caring personality; his gift to keep a secret is a ploy used for granting forgiveness, while he wages war on himself hoping to undermine conventions whose apprenticeship he skipped, whose membership he must refute, if he is to temper progress, if he is to confidently solicit a new critique; and there, he succeeded in a self portrait explicitly enigmatic. To continue to fail in understanding the elusive manner of his style is to deny the tragic comedy that informs our unbothered, bewildered existence! His demeanour echoes in the lore of his smile: Don't mourn me, go, and free yourselves from us...He is safer, now.