The playwright John Watler once wrote that "while they fight, we write." Well it's almost the same thing for artists from Caye Caulker and San Pedro, who through all the upheaval of the past few months have been steadily working to put together an art show at the Image Factory. Called Out of the Blue, the show demonstrates convincingly that island life is not as insular and myopic as you might think it to be.
They capture images that are familiar to their island homes and those that are close to the city. And now island painters have come out of the woodwork for this show called 'Out of the Blue.'
Gilvano Swasey, Curator
"What I have learnt is that even though the artists from San Pedro and Caye Caulker are successful, meaning that they have a very good market with the tourist industry there, they feel somehow left out of the whole art activity, not through their own fault but because they never had the time to accumulate
works and display it on a national level for people to see and enjoy and they have always wanted that opportunity for people to see that they are these tourists painters but that they have potentials and they have skills."
And now that they have come to the city where the largest number of painters, art lovers, and art buyers are concentrated, Swasey says that the relationship between island and mainland is what drives the creative dynamic in many of these pieces.
Gilvano Swasey,
"(For) the artists from Pedro and Caulker, there is a lot of activity: birds flying, fish frying, and beers drinking. There is movement then and they're very impressed to know they are in a very small geographic location, they can't move much, that their visions and their images and their works are diverse. Many of them paint scenes from the city and some of them haven't even been to the city that I have learnt. But they imagine this place everybody wishes to go to every time the boat leaves the island. So its very interesting the relationship that they have with us; some of them come physically and some of them visit us in dreams."
And one man whose dreams show him many things is Nelson Young, one of the most celebrated and accomplished Belizean painters. He's come up with a stunning
new suite of works called Creation.
Gilvano Swasey,
"His series is based on creation. There is a section on Adam and Eve, there is two single bodies, without faces and basically trying to kill any concept of well Adam is black or Eve is white or whatever. So he takes away their identity and he just makes them in the native form of how they were created. Then there is a second piece with a figure with a fish head and a man emerging and that is like a creation, a man being born and the fish is symbolic of the water where all life comes from. So Young, his stuff, you have to really look at it to get it but again the colors are very acidic, very violent in a sense. It makes you have to react to it."
The show opens tonight at the Image Factory.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift
