LeRoy Clarke: "This
oil painting on canvass (6x4)ft, titled UNDER IT ALL... EYE ALRIGHT is
from my El Tucuche series... It is on display at LEGACY HOUSE, where Eye
live and work... Enjoy."
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Paper delivered at UNESCO Symposium - “Leroy at 70” 2009
Revised: June 2013
“Is Really Obeah in Truth”
"By what standards do we measure the art of Leroy Clarke? Can we use western standards? Of course we can. After all, the tools and materials that he uses, the shapes and sizes of the paintings, the framing, the presentation in galleries, western style, made to fit western standard buildings. His arena is the west; and even the Trinidad and Tobago and Caribbean public is very westernized in its relationship to ‘Fine Art’, a western construct, if there ever was one.
Within this construct, if you’re not linked to somebody who is linked to somebody else in this construct, then you fall into the eccentric, primitive or ethnic or exotic, all of which have there little niches today.
We disregard these comfort zones and we link Leroy Clarke to Lam, and in the sequential pattern of Western Art History, link him ultimately to Picasso and Braque. This is good company and a good place to be; where even to argue against it would help to sustain the association with these artists of the ‘modern’ era, (that is, artists who fly in airplane and ting). All this is common knowledge, that Picasso and Lam took inspiration from African essential aesthetic and (especially in Lam’s case) spiritual elements also, and applied these elements to their work, just as Leroy does today, albeit with a little more fervour.
At the Carifesta Art Symposium in Guyana in August 2008, Cuba was invited to present a paper on Caribbean Art and Aesthetics. The good lady who made the presentation, a curator at one of Cuba’s many museums, gave to the gathering a power point presentation on the life and work of Wilfredo Lam and that was that.
I understood the point that she was making.
As an activist involved in the staging of national exhibitions, as an artist interested in a global reach, and as a Trinidadian wanting to make a name and stake a claim in the affairs of the world, I was forever involved in the promotion of the work of Leroy Clarke as the one to open the way for the abundance of artistic talent in T&T, just as that Cuban curator understood that Lam was their man, the signature of an era and space.
Rubadiri Victor, managing editor and publisher of ‘Generation Lion’ makes a stronger case for Leroy Clarke being the artist for us at this time in Trinidad and Tobago.
But I confess that I myself am not much concerned, in this presentation, with Leroy Clarke’s place in the pantheon of Western Art cosmology. I begin with the given, that his work has power; and this is also my point of departure.
Where does this power come from?
I look once more at the paintings, for in this context; by thy works shall ye be known.
I look at his spirit- like forms, his anthropomorphic abstractions, his experiments in textural manipulation, and his secret hieroglyphics. I study the dexterity of his line, his colour combinations, and his ambiguities. I compare his new work with the old, and I write;
“Recent work has shown a little less cubist tendencies, less archetypal symbols, a more playful dalliance with transparencies and reflections and spatial proportions. I perceive a greater involvement and excitement in the alchemy of the matter that he works with. All bear a stamp of vigour and authority”.
Not satisfied with this, I ask myself, what is this authority?
Leroy tells us it is obeah.
These days, people have a tendency to look for meaning in works of art, which in turn would give the works added value and power. One wants to journey through the painting seeking a deeper penetration into the nature of things. The meaning then, as much as any other quality one might find important, adds power to the work. So when we engage it, we are transported into our own dreams, or our own dark unconscious. The meaning in Leroy’s work is not only implied in his compositions and in his euphemistic titles, but also defined in his contextual notes and writing and speeches and poetry over the years. We engage the work with layers of context from “El Tucuche” to “Laventille Here There and Everywhere”, in language full of deep metaphor, and with extravagant forays into mystical planes. So much so that one has to ask oneself if one is not being mesmerized by linguistics. Leroy’s preoccupation with language has marked him as one of the first of T&T’s local artists to take these modern intellectual schools of thought with emphasis on “meaning”, and apply them to his work.
Leroy’s fascinstion with the spoken and written word has not only marked him as one of the foremost in a group of T&T artists to take these modern intellectual schools of thought and apply them to his work, but it has awarded him a place in history as a pioneer and innovator in the study and application of art, with his introduction of the term “Obeah”, both as his thesis and as his modus operandi. It is a complete change of paradigm.
His use of the term “obeah” in the realm of Fine Art and in the realm of philosophy, was phenomenal at the time. It helped pave the way for the legitimizing of obeah, so to speak, in the minds of the public and of the intelligentsia, giving it a sort of acceptance, if not respectability. And whether the Orisha practitioners liked it or not, he also widened the connotations of the word to encompass all the ritualistic aspects of the Orisha Tradition.
Obeah also implied a secret within the work that needed to be uncovered. A world of mystery, magic and omens, which would arouse a sense of curiousity and intrigue. Within the traditional African frame of reference, this is the esoteric value of the work that enhances and surpasses its material value, and this is what boggles the minds of Leroy’s detractors: what is his (expletive deleted) secret?
He tells you plain- “Obeah”.
Our problem, with regard to Leroy Clarke’s work, is that we really don’t believe it. We applaud his espousing his African spirituality in his speeches and writings and paintings; we find it clever, his refashioning of primitive concepts to modern philosophical and aesthetic discourse. But we don’t actually believe that Obeah is real, or worse yet, that we’ve been subject to its workings.
Even though he keeps telling us this over and over again.
Even though you see photographs in the newspapers showing him emerging from the bush, crowned with leaves of special herbs, dripping with sacred oils and holy water, after having undergone secret rituals presided over by the elite of the Orisha practitioners, including Babalawos from Ife in Nigeria.
Now when a man who knows what Obeah is, says to you “My work is Obeah”, don’t ‘get tie-up’. This is not a metaphor, like” Douennes” or “El Tucuche”, or “Landscapes of Consciousness”. It would serve you well to take him seriously, and study his work from that serious angle.
So this is my study, take it or leave it, of the Obeah in Leroy Clarke’s work.
Now as an aside, I remember two shopkeepers in Barataria. When one of them started to prosper a little more, the other would say, not without some malice, ‘He make Puja’. Puja for non-Hindus being Indian obeah, implying also unfair advantage – outside help, so to speak. And since people sometimes greet me with “If you is this big- time artist, how come you not rich”? I am tempted to retort: “He make Obeah”!
To be serious now, firstly, Leroy’s obeah is tied in with his word. One of his favorite biblical quotes is ‘In the beginning was the word’. He believes in word magic and works word-magic. ‘Utterances’ was the theme of a whole exhibition of his at Aquarella Gallery, fifteen years ago. He has found ways to use the word to recreate whole existences, even refashioning his own life story into a non-ending Wilson Harrisian odyssey, from “Fragments” through “El Tucuche” to “De Distance is Here”- poet as hero, the great Eye, mythisizing his own self in the process.
How does this affect one’s approach to his paintings?
One approaches a myth with reverence, with acknowledgement, with wonder. One is obeahed from the start.
There is a very interesting catalogue from the Museum of African Art in New York edited by M. Hooten, entitled “Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and reveals”. Some very illuminating essays which talk about the devices that the artists use for their ritual artifacts and icons and masks, such as coding- this number of dots, that number of dashes, also the use of special letters and symbols. We talking Leroy Clarke here.
They say in this book that these artist/obeah men even use obscurity as a device, where they would suggest the presence of something while at the same time camouflage it, and they talk about the different ways the obeah is hidden in the work; and that it is the presence of the obeah that gives the object value and power.
“Recent art-historical studies have discussed how African works of art phrase secret knowledge to a visual grammar. Abstraction, accumulation, obscurity, omission and containment are some principles of secrecy’s visual language in many African cultures. In the art of the Akan, the Bamana and other cultures, for example, there is often a dialectic between what is seen and what is unseen. The more secret the thing is, the more enigmatic and non-representational its form. Monni Adams, exploring the “silent beat” in African geometric patterns, has discovered that behind them sometimes lies the codification of secret information, or the invocation of invisible presences.” (Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals. Metropolitan Museum of Art)
So when one of these works is commissioned or purchased, it is purchased for this power resident in it that will be of benefit to the owner. They the artists are nonplussed that western art enthusiasts should want to cart away ‘objects of art’ that have been divested of their magical inserts because for them it is the obeah in it that gives the work its significance.
So too, I am saying that in the work of Leroy Clarke, obeah is the most significant factor. Perhaps other scholars in the future will give this more serious study. Such a study might include as subjects, those people who, quite irrationally it seems, declare an aversion towards his work. While some of them are expectedly mixing up the man and his ideas with the work that he does (Sometimes this works positively for the artist, and other times otherwise), there are those who are either afraid of it (the work) or suspicious of it, as though they are consciously or intuitively aware of its subliminal powers and for them to entertain these powers even for an instant would take courage and knowledge beyond their cranial capacity.
It’s a quantum leap, so to speak.
Which brings me lastly believe it or not, to this thing called quantum mechanics, which I cared little for, until I came across an intriguing documentary called ‘What the Bleep – Down the Rabbit Hole’, a documentary that gives an introduction and some insights into this field and some of its findings. One of the experiments in quantum studies was to show how the powers of thought and intentions, in communion with forces unknown, affect matter and energy, and using scientific experiments to demonstrate their hypothesis.
Intention….communion….unknown forces….
This is what we used to call high science, sounding remarkably like the obeah we speak of, which Leroy practices with a discipline and single-mindedness that are unsurpassable.
Leroy’s scientific methods and techniques in this regard have not been properly documented, least of all by himself. For the present we merely have incidental and anecdotal references which to quote here might sooner trivialize the discourse rather than fulfill our purpose of elucidation. In another paper, “The Technique of Obeah, as practiced by Leroy Clark in his Making Art”, December 2010, I have attempted to describe parts of his process that I myself have witnessed.
Some artists carry a fire burning inside of them and allow that fire to burn randomly and indiscriminately. Not so, Leroy. Like the gas welder who hones his flame to fire points of intensity, Leroy harnesses and focuses his flame to points of concentrated intention.
If the intention is to command the attention of the world, then he is right on target. This event is hosted by the United Nations i.e. All the nations of the world, paying attention today to his work and himself, and his work sooner or later will be featured in every country in the world, in the major museums of the world, because Leroy Clarke has intended it and willed it, authored it and obeahed it, so that long after he is gone his obeah will continue to work for him, and there is nothing anyone else will be able to do about it?"
Makemba Kunle 09’
