The fine arts content at Carifesta VIII was dominated by the Exhibition of Works from the Distinguished Artists in the halls of the Presidential Palace in Suriname. This exhibition, in turn, was dominated by the two visiting artistic luminaries, Philip Moore of Guyana and LeRoy Clarke of Trinidad and Tobago.

Both were specially honoured by Caricom, who invited them to Carifesta VIII as the “Distinguished Artists”, and they were further honoured by the host government. President Runaldo Venetiaan, Suriname’s Head of State, who hosted them at his official residence, which he described as “the home of the people” opened the exhibition and the artists were presented with special awards at the closing ceremony.

There was other art on show, but much of it was commercial. A group of local painters had a show in the lobby of the Hotel Krasnapolsky, which was quite crowded, taking on the appearance of a Carifesta village of its own.

There was another at the Sana Budaya where Ramlila and the Ramayana were performed, adding to what was exhibited and offered for sale in the Grand Market. But the best work was to be found among the five “Distinguished Artists”.

Their exhibition strove to uphold the festival’s main theme, “unity in diversity”. The other three were Surinamese, whose work and background illustrated that refrain. Soekhi’s paintings gave a strong reflection of the Javanese tradition to which he belongs, but they also contained the kind of traditional influences that may be found in much of Surinamese art. This retention of the traditional is one of the strongest and most arresting features in the arts of the country, and includes the intuitive, which is also prominent in the work of Clarke and Moore.

Unlike these, on the other hand, Egbert Lieveld is a realist who attempted to document unity and diversity in the co-existence of people in the Surinamese community.

He utilized the multi-media in some of his pieces depicting multi-culturality in local religious and social life. He reproduced one of the “wonders” of Paramaribo, a street on which a mosque, a Hindu temple and a Christian church stand side by side on the same street, a series of historical buildings and overcrowded tenement yards reminiscent of those in the English-speaking Caribbean. Then, quite apart from the other four, Cornelly Aloema stood alone. She is a potter, the only female, the only one who was not a painter, and the least remarkable of the group.

In contrast to her pieces of pottery, Moore and Clarke had the most outstanding work on show in terms of general achievement and form as well as the size, thematic depth and the sheer power of the pieces.

The two had a lot in common. They are both spiritualists, although Clarke draws a lot more from myth and a certain degree of literariness and metaphor, while Moore generates the quality of folk religion and metaphysics. It is not without significance that on the first day of the exhibition a group of female Surinamese folk singers were performing around the exhibition area.

They then began dancing to the traditional drums and soon became (unintentionally) possessed. One in particular, had to be carefully and safely guided out of her trance by the drums and the attention of her peers.

Moore’s career has been long associated with that deep root of spirituality. He is a Jordanite Edler and a visionary artist by ‘divine anointment’. Clarke’s “vision” was more conscious and academic.

One of his main motifs in the exhibition was “recharting the ruin in order to regain one’s social and spiritual sovereignty”, expressed in the way he used El Touche, Trinidad’s second highest mountain.

It was in 1970 when I suddenly got that awareness. It struck me like a visitation. It was: that for the rest of my life I would paint and write about a journey that would describe the recharting of the ruin of man back to a place or a state of grace from which he supposedly fell.

In pursuing their missions, both Moore and Clarke have expressed themselves in poems as well as the visual arts. Moore has written “Don’t Take the Thorns from the Roses” and some of his paintings in the exhibition contained verse pieces written into the canvass in a form consistent with his intuitive style.

Clarke attempted none of this, and his poems tend to be in separate published collections. But he did not venture into the metaphysical formal integration of the two that added that extra dimension to Moore’s work at the Palace.

The other important area of contact between these artists is that they are both Africanists.

This was quite evident in the visual quality of the works on show, their uses of colour, particularly the treatment of primary colours, their motifs and thematic preoccupations. Again, Clarke has adopted a studied interest, which is to large extent thematic and metaphorical. It dawned on him in the 1970s.

We were just at the beginning of an awareness that our African being-ness had to be seized or be created. The ‘seventies’ was a time that, for an African man, serious introspection was being done and this is the way I responded to that climate.

Clarke sees himself on a journey. “My whole life’s work is an epic. That’s because I am painting the same theme for years”. An ongoing preoccupation of his evident in the exhibition is to paint “the special quality that enhances and distinguishes the Caribbean”, which is “its Africanness”.

An extension of this interest in Clarke’s work was his use of Afro-Trinidadian myth represented by the “Douene”. In Trinidadian folklore, derived from Africa, douens are the spirits of children who died before they were baptised or given names. This, according to Clarke, “describes the state of Africans in the diaspora”. “we live in douendom. We have no name. A people stripped of identity”.

A striking quality of Moore’s “Africanness” that certainly identifies his work is that characteristic style, evident in the show in the Palace, that involves his sculpture, cubism and a use of space on the canvass commonly seen in Haitian painters.

Moore’s own explanation is that he inherited these forms from his ancestral wood carvers in Africa; that his cubist tendencies derive from the African root source to which Picasso went when he discovered cubism. These are forms that were unequalled in the exhibition; forms that make Moore an original and unique artist.

In his use of intuitive art he does not confine himself to primary colours in the way Jamaicans Everard Brown and Malika Kapo Reynolds do, for instance. So confident is his employment of those qualities claimed to be African that, rather than being limited by them, he has made them his own.

Although Suriname can rightly claim to have hosted a successful Carifesta, one of the marked limitations is that it did not showcase a comprehensive exhibition of the leading art of the region because so much that could be representative of the arts of many territories was missing.

In keeping with this general picture, the Distinguished Artists exhibition cannot pretend to be anything more than a small sample of the art of three countries.

Then again, that was the only place where art of any worth from different countries was shown. But Caricom’s selections were very judicious and informed.

The sample was instructive and managed to demonstrate similar trends in a multi-cultural region, as well as the profound differences that could give the audience an idea of what the art of at least one of their leading artists is like.