Art lovers view paintings on display at the Anniversary Exhibition at Castellani House. (Pictures by Mike Norville)
THE anniversary exhibition of works from the national collection now at Castellani House is more than a fitting tribute to the art form that remains as splendid as ever among the endeavours of Guyanese.

We cannot say the same for many other disciplines on the local scene. There has been a decline in so much of what we do. But our artists continue to do us proud.

The programme for the current display mentions four of our better artists who have passed away, a quartet of luminaries that has contributed its effulgence to the considerable constellation of Guyanese artists over the years.

They are Marjorie Broodhagen, Stephanie Correia, Hubert Moshett and Maylene Duncan. They had all received national honours, but for Duncan, who died last month in her early forties. Perhaps a posthumous honour for Ms. Duncan would be in order.

Four of Duncan’s pieces are part of the exhibition, fine examples of the magic she weaves when putting people together in striking tableaux. There is Serious Times, three elderly men worrying a topic that is obviously close to their hearts, grey hair luminous in the twilight, one large, capable hand in the air, a bicycle telling us that one of the trio had stopped short on his journey for the important conference.

And there is her String Talk, two boys perched on a chair looking through a window and pictured from behind, muttering in conspiracy, one’s hand touching the shoulder of the other lightly, a bit of string trailing from a chubby fist, perhaps all that was left in the child’s grasp from a kite snarled in some tree on the outside. Much of the charm of this picture is the intimacy between the two that the artist manages.

The Marjorie Broodhagen pieces on show are typical of her work, painstakingly detailed depictions of seeds, pods, leaves, pomegranates and lemons, brilliantly reproduced, testimony to a keen eye and a sense that the artist is at one with her subjects.

Stephanie Correia’s pieces are in keeping with her ancestry, painstakingly depictions of caciques and arrows and jugs, all in carefully managed juxtaposition.

Hubert Moshett’s work is represented by a splendid self-portrait, bristling with impasto, and a bird’s eye view of a Sugar Estate, a billow of smoke curling from canes burning in the field, with house in rows, factory buildings, a punt in a canal with a mule on the bank, a school and a church, a fetching picture of how it once was.

There are other paintings of what used to be, creating a nostalgia among viewers old enough to recognise what they see.

There is Kenton Wyatt’s The Palms, majestic with its imposing facade, and now forever gone. And there is Main Street Church, anonymous and undated, with magnificent trees and flower plots on the Main Street promenade, the church nestling to the left, a pristine beacon luring the faithful into its recesses.

Absorbing art and sharing Guyanese traditions - eating from the `puri leaf’.
And then there is Bernadette Persaud’s Going To Masjid, another emblem of our religious complexity, and depicted in a different mode.

In the foreground of her work Ms. Persaud places two girls, pony-tailed and full of joie de vivre, their seemingly secular bonhomie in contrast to the stately, forbidding, kaftan-clad figure silhouetted in the doorway of the Muslim church with its distinctive onion-shaped dome. And all this is enveloped in a maze of mottled colour, very much as if the holy man and his church were slipping away from the girls, and they themselves were being smothered in the wreaths of colour.

There are a few of Angold Thompson’s water-colours, full of the wonders he does with light, especially in his Day of Rest and Between the Trees.

Some of the old masters are there: Denis Williams’ Leila, a sad longing in the handsome face contrasting with the partyish sheen in her satin dress; E.R. Burrowes’ evocative Eucalyptus Tree and Ron Savory’s haunting Forest Lights.

Philbert Gajadhar is a brilliant colourist and this is quite evident in his Kathak 1X. Here, his dancer in enmeshed in broken shards of kaleidoscopic colours, self-effacing and mysterious, as if the woman is overcome by the intricate rhythm cycles of her traditional dance.

All in all, this anniversary exhibition is a celebration more than worth the while, a shining microcosm of the output of our artists.

The pity is that Castellani House does not offer a larger gallery to show off more of the national collection. There must be many more gems hidden away wherever it is that we keep this invaluable cache of our very own art.