Activity: Question and answer session
Date: 18th June 2018
Host: Moray House Trust
Stanley is one of Guyana’s ‘uomo universales’ – skilled in painting, poetry, sculpture, wood-carving, pottery and much more. How did this mosaic of talents emerge ? The rest of this introduction will attempt to trace the shaping of Stanley’s skills by recounting snippets of his life story (as chronicled by Rupert Roopnaraine in ‘Primacy of the Eye: The Art of Stanley Greaves.’)
“Stanley Greaves was born to Priscilla and John Greaves at 6.00 am on November 23rd 1934 at the Public Hospital Georgetown. Priscilla knew the exact time because the 6 o’clock gun went off. (Daybreak in the colony was announced by a gunshot fired from the seawall near to the lighthouse.) Stanley’s mother hailed from Agricola Village on the East Bank of Demerara. Stanley’s father’s father had been born in Barbados and was part of a stream of migrants from the Caribbean islands who went to settle in BG.
Stanley grew up in the heart of the city, in a tenement yard a stone’s throw away from the landmark of St. George’s Cathedral. Lot 132 Carmichael Street was a yard where working-class tenants lived cheek-by-jowl in single room ranges. The yard was a little world of its own, with an enforced but genuine sense of community.
Stanleys’s primary education began at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic School for boys in Main Street. In 1944, the ten year old from the tenement yard was admitted to his first “art group”: the select circle of boys who made drawings, copying illustrations of famous persons from World War II who had been featured on TIME magazine covers.
In 1946 he was awarded a scholarship to St. Stanislaus College for boys. It was at Saints that an event occurred that determined the direction of his life: one of his former school friends, Lloyd Bouyea, told him that an artist called Burrowes was conducting free art classes, weekly on Thursday evenings. The Working People’s Art Class, for such it was, was founded by E.R Burrowes in 1948. Greaves took away from the WPAC, and from Burrowes in particular, a commitment to the sharing of knowledge and an uncompromising attitude to the practice of art.
The headmaster of Saint Stanislaus approached him in 1957 to become the first ever Art Master at his alma mater. He was drawn to teaching, stimulated by the challenge of getting children to discover things about themselves and their country and to do so through art. In 1962 Greaves and his young family left for the UK. Stanley was able to obtain some financial assistance from an unlikely source. Anthony Tasker, an expatriate director of the Booker Group of Companies and art lover, obtained funds from the company and later on from the Government. While in London he met Aubrey Williams, his fellow Guyanese artist, and through discussions and observation gained some idea of what it was like to be a practising Caribbean artist in London. The conclusions were not appealing: either join the mainstream or remain marginalised. That first year in London he bought his first real Spanish guitar for 12 guineas.
At the University of Newcastle, his Director of Studies was Richard Hamilton, the doyen of the Pop Art movement in Britain. Stanley was the only non-British student in the Art department. He felt no connection with Pop Art and came to feel so isolated he was ready to return to Guyana at the end of the first year. His ability to work in different media saved the day. He decided to do sculpture instead: painting would have to await his return home. Greaves’ particular temperament made the expression of reduced form in sculpture extremely attractive to him. He found the work of Brancusi, Marini and Noguchi very instructive and wrote his thesis on Brancusi. On his return to Guyana in 1968, Greaves worked as Art Master at two leading secondary schools, the Berbice High School and Queen’s College, to which he was transferred in 1971, replacing Donald Locke who had left to seek his fortune as an artist in London. In 1975 Greaves was appointed Head of the newly formed Division of Creative Arts at the University of Guyana, where efforts to establish extensive programmes were defeated due to the sudden decline of the economy. In a rare victory over the university bureaucracies, Greaves did manage, after a struggle, to have Martin Carter appointed as poet-in-residence. Along with Professor William Carr, Rayman Mandal and Michael Aarons, Greaves and Carter made up an informal group that met on and off campus to discuss a wide range of topics and read their poems to each other. Carter provided Greaves with the means to develop a critical response to his work in art as well as in poetry. Carter taught him precision in the use of language and drew connections – between art and morality, poetry and politics, intention and execution, the private and the public – that resonated with his own concerns.
In 1977 he went into the hinterland with his friend Bobby Fernandes who was photographing little known waterfalls. Greaves always had a special feeling for the forest and on this particular trip he experienced an epiphany that had a profound effect on him. He felt that some vital aspect of his psyche had at last returned to Guyana. On his return to Georgetown, his application of his concept of the “lattice effect” created a significant stylistic turn in his work that had to do with the act of perception and the way it affects presentation of shape and form. The result attracted such comments as ‘reworked cubism.’ Greaves’ only response was to suggest that his commentators should view the world through the fronds of palm leaves or jalousied windows.
A Fulbright award in 1979 led Greaves to Howard University to see how “black artists”, as self-described, dealt with issues of race and art. In 1981 Greaves went on sabbatical leave to Barbados where he studied ceramics with Bill Grace, an eminent ceramicist who practised the Japanese approach to ceramics involving the role of chance, something diametrically opposite to Greaves’ approach.
In 1985 he married English-born landscape painter Alison Chapman-Andrews and relocated to Barbados. In 1990 Greaves became a part-time tutor at the Barbados Community College and in 1996 began to teach stone sculpture, later adding woodcarving to the syllabus.
An interest in the origins of Western philosophy led Greaves to worrying thoughts about the nonexistence of speculative philosophy in the Caribbean. While at the University of Guyana he had made two failed attempts to have an introduction to philosophy taught as a foundation course. It was this interest in philosophical questions that led to the small-scale paintings of the Caribbean Metaphysics series. His feeling was that perhaps through the tool of speculative thought we might arrive at some solutions to the interminable debate on Caribbean identity.
Throughout the years Greaves has maintained his interest in figure painting. In these, individuals were invariably presented with implements in their hands. This was a reference, perhaps, to his father, like himself, the son of a maker of things. It is a title Greaves prefers to that of artist.”