Soyi­ni Grey

Trinidad pi­cong and artis­tic sen­si­tiv­i­ties col­lid­ed when a pho­to­graph of the new wax stat­ue of the Ca­lyp­so King of the World, Slinger “The Mighty Spar­row” Fran­cis­co, un­veiled in Bar­ba­dos last week was shared on so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day.

For Trinida­di­ans, it was yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of an un­at­trac­tive at­tempt at cre­at­ing a stat­ue of Fran­cis­co. Jokes and the memes lam­poon­ing the stat­ue were soon shared wide­ly on­line. But for the sculp­tor Ar­turo Ed­ward, there’s noth­ing fun­ny about jabs at his art.

Ed­ward, who cre­at­ed the stat­ue for the Caribbean Wax Mu­se­um, who un­veiled the stat­ue in trib­ute to Spar­row’s con­tri­bu­tion to the re­gion through his mu­sic last week, was not amused. He re­spond­ed to sev­er­al com­ments un­der one Face­book post with the fol­low­ing stock re­sponse, “When a face is in (top-down) shad­ow and fad­ed, it could be that of any­body’s.”

Ex­plain­ing the un­flat­ter­ing im­age of his work via Face­book Mes­sen­ger lat­er on, he added, “The light­ing on the fig­ure in the pic­ture is com­ing from the back and top. That kind of light­ing is nor­mal­ly used in hor­ror pic­tures.”

Ed­ward said he was not pleased with the crit­i­cism, read­i­ly ad­mit­ting to be­ing sen­si­tive about his work. But he is al­so con­cerned that the neg­a­tive com­ments can be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly by the peo­ple he is hop­ing to im­mor­talise in rub­ber and wax in fu­ture. There are plans to cre­ate a David Rud­der stat­ue by next Feb­ru­ary and Ed­ward wor­ries that Rud­der, who has vis­it­ed the mu­se­um and ap­proved of what he saw dur­ing that vis­it, may change his mind af­ter he sees the com­ments on the Spar­row stat­ue and may re­spond to the in­vi­ta­tion with, “But you not good! You don’t know what you are do­ing!”

The work of the Caribbean Wax Mu­se­um is cen­tred around cel­e­brat­ing our Caribbean icons while they are still alive. Ed­ward does want to make an ex­cep­tion for the late Trinida­di­an pi­anist Hazel Scott. Born in Port-of-Spain, had she lived, the clas­si­cal­ly-trained mu­si­cian would have been 100 this year.

The Caribbean Wax Mu­se­um is in the pas­sion project of Ed­ward and his wife. It hous­es over 50 fig­ures and he says it is run­ning out of space but memo­ri­al­is­ing our greats is part of its es­sen­tial work.

As for yes­ter­day’s vi­ral pho­to­graph and the com­ments it sparked, Ed­ward said he was re­mind­ed of the im­por­tance of good light­ing. He shared a pho­to­graph of the head of the stat­ue and a video to Guardian Me­dia as proof of his work’s qual­i­ty. Ed­ward has not heard from Spar­row as yet, but his wife has seen it and Ed­ward said she gave her ap­proval of his work.