Like most Continental Coastal Caribbean towns, Georgetown, like Belize City, today, has a rugged feel. One moves through busy, either wide or narrow but neglected avenues, dusty roads, active canals and real rivers, leading into the “Interior”- the South American jungle. Georgetown is the index of this not easily understood interior space. In this way, the thick verses of a writer like Wilson Harris or the radiant and sometimes monolithic painterly forms of Aubrey Williams unravel, as well as, the tragic sense of social and political deceit often conveyed by the recent images of Stanley Greaves.

This is a country very much stuck in-between its past moment or possibility - its dream spaces - and the current challenging circumstances. Like the islands, it is also a society very caught up with and within its own internal competitive stories. And then the repeating story of emigration, and of returning.

In Guyana, most art conversations still revolve around the Working Peoples Art Class founded and driven by E.R. Burrowes in the late 40’s after whom an art school was eventually named. An official Culturalist / Nationalist narrative, articulated and reverently reiterated, by artists such as Denis Williams, Donald Locke and Stanley Greaves expresses wonder and gratitude as well as awe of this individual and this moment.

The national collection, much of which is still not on view or available, is stored at Castellani House, a stereotypical colonial mansion once an inaccessible and guarded official residence now a partially air conditioned makeshift place with a few artworks, a few polite but wary security guards and the familiar civil service brown and or grey desks and filing cabinets- an installation almost, symbolizing our worst fears if you grew up in the region in the 60s and 70s or the usual stereotypical site for the European travel writer. So… how does one match the status of this repeated and reputed narrative in Georgetown with an actual experience?

Bernadette Persaud, one of the country’s prominent artists and writers sees the standard narrative of art in Guyana, formulated in the 60s and 70s, as not inclusive enough or as much too concerned with the mythology of a singular group. One can say that her writing takes on a Socialist tone, derived from that same era, but it expresses betrayal. She discusses the Guyanese experience from an alternative perspective as a woman and also as an artist of East Indian origin, many of whom, as she puts it, were often written out of the cultural narrative in its formative years after independence.

Persaud’s paintings are expressionistic in feel and show stylistic connections to painters in Trinidad such as Isaiah Boodhoo and Kenwyn Crichlow. An equally useful comparison could also be made with the conceptual and multimedia work of Wendy Nanan in Trinidad. Nanan, however, has never been particularly concerned with painting in the conventional sense or the pictorial while this is a new step for Persaud.

Persaud’s concerns are predominantly narrative and socially aware while reflecting upon her ethnic identity and the political history of her country. For example, an important series of paintings entitled Gentlemen in the Gardens showed armed men between tropical foliage like that of the renown Botanical Gardens of Georgetown. The artist’s more recent work looks beyond painting to the use of triangular flags, Jhandi, and Rangoli, the floor delineations of coloured powder derived from Hindu rituals. Despite that immediate reference her imagery, one can say, includes the iconography of the broader range of religious practices in the Caribbean.

But, there has always been another art conversation revolving around Guyana as a site of memory or place of origin as larger communities of artists reside and work abroad; in the United States, Canada and of course London. Artist like Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams, Greg Henry, Michelle Mohabeer, Roshini Kempadoo or Hew Locke to name but a few. These artists are part of an international mainstream who engage Guyana whether Guyana engages them or not.

This not to say that the relation of foreign based artist to Guyana is not also a troubled one for them. As with Locke the relationship comes through his “social point of view or way of understanding life in Europe and also through a sense of texture, form and space..”. One can say it is about the shape of his visual voice or sensibility derived from drawings and photographs done on his return visits.

With Kempadoo it is about her photographs and research into historical archives tallied with her own personal and family experiences. The question for these artists is often driven by their own negotiations with the way they are labeled as outsiders in both locations.

Throughout the region this home and abroad conversation remains quite an issue especially as it remains questionable today, in the aftermath of the handing over and flag- raising ceremonies of the 60s, as to the degree to which the nation states we have made or have inherited are willing or are capable of facilitating or maintaining the circumstances, the level of critical and professional debate and state or private sector funding that allows the same level of growth for their artists who stay.
A question yet to be answered truthfully as the success of various writers of the 50’s and 60s are annexed to national inventories and mythologies.

Under the very long shadow of these unresolved questions newer generations of artists now have to find their way. Stay or leave; engage or disengage. Of this generation of artists, still living and working in Georgetown today, are people such as Winslow Craig an artist of First Nations (Amerindian) origin and an accomplished sculptor who graduated from the Burrows School of Art in the late 80s…his interest in indigenous peoples have lead him the New Zealand, Belize as well as China .

Like many of his generation, his work is influenced by sci-fi comics, social realist modes, derived from the era of Williams, often showing man and machine entangled sometimes with heavy sense of dystopia or naïve positivism or the rhetoric of striving and “struggle”. Sometimes there are the usual investigations of the female form, love and desire. Most strikingly though, there is also, an interest in technical challenge; in skill itself derived from the feat of working the wood - a stylistic and imaginative reverie unfolds as one moves through his studio.

Other themes are more whimsical. A series of facial expressions are carved out of raw unpolished wood in which the marks of the chisel become part of the expressionistic vocabulary or surface articulation of the work. One group of reaching hands expresses popular struggle and yearning. Another reflects upon the Mayan step pyramids in the Yucatan.

An associate of Craig’s, is Carl Anderson, an obsessive Photo-Realist painter, whose works either infer the female figure or render it directly and uncompromisingly. This brings up traditional questions about nudity and nakedness as well as speculations about the objectification of women. His female forms apart from being trapped by his gaze are also entangled or bound in unending streams of ribbon in various colours that sometimes infer parades, a fair ground revelry like May pole or even the Guyanese flag. The contours of an absent female form are created by these same ribbons, in some works while many paintings refer to sculptures of the female form also made by the artist. Investigative feats and craftsmanship drive this painter. After first leaving Guyana, Anderson spent a lot of time in Venezuela and in the USA where his interest in painting and photorealism in particular grew.

One of the few older generation artists, who has returned and remained there, in body if not in mind only, is Philip Moore. His painting and sculpture looks more toward codifying, in visual form, folklore, African religion and traditions or historical events like a bridge building or a legendary cricket match as discussed by the writer Rupert Roopnarine. However, some of his constructions may also refer to Multi armed deities, which are part of the visual vocabulary or awareness of most people living in the Southern Caribbean.

Talking with the artist there is also a strong narrative intent and socio-political consciousness tied in with mysticism and a desire for a lost or constantly challenged cosmic balance. Like his dense stippled, patterned surfaces and imagery, the artist often speaks in parables and codes. A symbolic painterly diagram of a hurricane hitting Miami unravels into a moral tale about greed and arrogance, a stolen election and retribution for a war for oil. One can see connections in his work to the earlier allegorical works of Leroy Clarke of Trinidad as well as the enterprise of cultural memory, storytelling and the pursuit of indigenous representational modes and aesthetics of Embah also of Trinidad.

Whatever the arguments or positions that unravel in looking at the work of artists in Guyana it is a rich and complex range, derived from the fact that the Georgetown sits on the coast of the larger yet to be grappled with continent while looking out towards the Caribbean at large.