Ron Savory: A Guyanese quest
to St Lucia. He opened his studio on a hill on L’Anse Road. But he maintained contact with Guyana. In the 90s he was contracted to create artwork to be hung in the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI) on Water Street in Georgetown. The artwork is still there on the walls. In 1991, he was commissioned to execute 12 original and 327 prints for the Pegasus Hotel in Guyana. These works were hung in the western wing of the hotel. He returned to Guyana in October 1993 for a two- week exhibition at the Hadfield Foundation in Georgetown. He returned again in June-July 1996 for an exhibition at the National Gallery, Castellani House. There he did an on-the-spot painting based on a poem read by Ian Mc Donald. His last exhibition in Guyana was “Evocations on Caribbean Literature Revisited” at the National Gallery of Art in March 2010.
Savory died in 2019 in St Lucia.
Context
Savory came of age at the moment when Guyana was itself coming into its own. There was much local political activity, including the first fully-elected government in 1953, the removal of this government 133 days later, and the split in the PPP in 1957. There was much activity among the working class, and businesses and the civil service were transitioning to Guyanese management. In the background to all this was independence from Great Britain.
A local intelligentsia was developing and local writers such as Martin Carter, A J Seymour and Wilson Harris had been writing and publishing a new kind of Guyanese poetry since 1950.
Seymour had founded the journal KykOver-Al in 1945. Jan Carew published Black Midas and The Wild Coast in 1958, and Wilson Harris published Palace of the Peacock in 1960.
It was also the time when Guyanese began to emerge and develop as nationally- known artists. This movement had started when expatriate artists and artlovers created the British Guiana Arts and Crafts Society (BGACS) in 1931. This attracted local people of talent and out of it eventually came the Pioneers of Guyanese Art, including artists such as Hubert Moshett, E R Burrowes, Reginald Phang, Vivian Antrobus, Sam Cummings, R G Sharples.
The Guyanese artists avidly took up painting in the style of European landscapes. From 1944, the British Council entered the picture and began providing art materials and magazines, and bringing artists and critics to Guyana to give talks. The locals also began to diverge from the
European style and developed their own landscape and local subject matter, and also began to use new techniques and styles of painting learnt from the talks and magazines.
The BGACS held annual exhibitions, and as interest in art grew, local people formed their own art classes such as the Guianese Art Group (around 1945) and the significantly-named Working People’s Free Art Class ( 1948) started by Burrowes. These classes attracted and nurtured young locals and helped create the second generation of Guyanese artists.
Savory was part of this second generation. He joined the Working Peoples Art
Class in 1957, and was among the many brilliant people who made up the second generation of Guyanese artists. This group included Marjorie Broodhagen, Basil Hinds, Edna Harte, Denis Williams and later, Savory, Greaves, Donald Locke, Michael Leila, Aubrey Williams, and Emerson Samuel.
He was active in a range of arts and activities, and had a circle of young friends and intellectuals who were among the cream of the crop of Guyana in the 1950s-70s: the Taitt House group including Corsbie, Matthews, Gilkes, the Taitts, Sam, Greaves, Leila, Locke and others. These were the people who were creating Guyanese innovations in theatre, broadcasting, literature, music, dance, and art, and we see in Savory’s paintings a similar, innovative response to the idea of a Guyanese nation and culture rooted in the land itself.
Art
Savory held his first solo exhibition in 1959, and his subjects were “…stevedores, rural landscapes, figures washing in the creeks, and flowers…”. But his art underwent a profound change after he encountered the Guyana jungle in 1959. He showed works from his time in Kamarang in a 1962 exhibition along with Leila, Samuels, and Greaves at the Bookers Universal Building. One of his early interior paintings, Kamarang, shows the continuing interest in people as in his earlier work. In this painting, his subject is people scratching out a living through backbreaking labour. He depicts them in dark brown, half-naked. He unromantically captures their poverty, their dreams, and their strength. He uses a rough, scratched technique to convey the harshness of their lives. In the interior, he had seen and was fascinated by the landscape and the petroglyphs at Imbaimadai.
He developed a new and personal style of painting, and he began using the Imbaimadai Petroglyphs in his work. Savory is usually credited with being the first to use indigenous art in his work. But this is debatable since his contemporaries also realised the cultural value of the petroglyphs. Some used them in their artwork, most notably Greaves (from around 1954), Locke, and Williams. But these artists eventually realised that they could not authentically sustain the use indigenous art. In his use of indigenous motifs, Savory did not just put them into his paintings but tried to use them as part of his composition of the picture. As seen in Bowman, the lines making up the figure also divide up the picture plane into different sections, and they also impose a grid of order on the more turbulent depiction of the river and jungle. Of course, this is a parallel to what the bowman actually does – he guides the boat through the treacherous water, thus allowing it to pass safely.
Another major change was that the interior landscape itself had a profound influence on Savory. In an interview I did with him in 1996, he said it was “…a culture shock which I took a while to recover from. This was a landscape which was basically dwarfing man. Man was not important as far as I could see…”. From this shock flowed a number of series of unique paintings. One of the earliest of these is the “Canopy” series. In another