Caribbean Art contains a chapter covering Popular religion, festival arts and the visionary which includes the following:
"Two aspects of popular culture, the religions and the festival arts, are particularly important to the visual arts, as subjects and as sources of artistic production in their own right …
Philomé Obin … was a devout Protestant and primarily a secular artist … Obin’s best-known religious works are his contributions to the mural cycle at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Holy Trinity (1950-51) in Port-au-Prince.
The Holy Trinity mural project was executed by the major ‘primitives’ attached to the Centre d’Art at the time. It was initiated and directed by Selden Rodman and enthusiastically supported by Bishop Alfred Voegeli, an early patron of the Haitian art movement. The first section to be completed was the apse, with three major murals, The Nativity, The Crucifixion and The Ascension by Rigaud Benoit, Philomé Obin and Castera Bazile, respectively. Despite the distinct painting styles of each contributor, the apse murals form a surprisingly coherent whole, although the sugary angels and tumbling rosebuds by Gabriel Lévèque (b. 1923) in the upper section detract from the more formal compositions below. Obin also painted the stately Last Supper in the west transept chapel and Wilson Bigaud the spectacular Wedding at Cana in the east transept. The mural cycle includes smaller paintings by Bazile and several other artists. In 1954, Bishop Voegeli added a terracotta choir screen by Jasmin Joseph (b. 1923).
The biblical events represented in the Holy Trinity murals were placed in a modern, recognizably Haitian context, a revolutionary departure at the time. The actual biblical figures were represented according to conventional Christian iconography, although most were ‘Haitianized’ by combining Caucasian features with a darker skin. Some murals contain Vaudou-related motifs, such as the drums and sacrificial animals in Bigaud’s Wedding at Cana. While several participating artists were Vaudou practitioners, this does not mean that the murals are disguised Vaudou art since the references to Vaudou were included to depict typical Haitian life. Not all of this happened spontaneously, however, and contemporary accounts reveal that Rodman encouraged the artists to include anecdotic Haitian details, to the point where some felt he was interfering. While the results were generally successful, the mural project illustrate that the ‘primitives’ were already then willing and able to adapt to the demands of patronage.
Predictably, the project was at first highly controversial in Haiti. Some members of the establishment felt the murals were sacrilegious and inappropriate for a mainstream Christian church. The Holy Trinity murals were executed during the conflict about the promotion of the ‘primitives’ by the Centre d’Art and in fact contributed to the crisis. The importance of the murals to Haiti is now well recognized, although they are in urgent need of restoration …
The Jamaican intuitive sculptor and painter Mallica ‘Kapo’ Reynolds (1911 - 89) was a Revivalist bishop and, like most other Caribbean artists-priests, he claimed to have received divine instruction to start carving and painting. His subjects vary widely, from biblical figures, angels and Revivalist rituals to the landscape or market scenes, yet even his secular works portray the social and physical context of Revivalism. Many paintings and sculptures are autobiographical and include self-images of Kapo in his capacity as church leader. Some of his most outstanding works are about women and reflect the prominence of women in the cult …
… Guyanese painter and sculptor Philip Moore (b. 1921) … is associated with the Jordanites, an inspirational Guyanese church, but his work expresses a very personal, utopian vision of Guyana, an ideal of community in a country that has a history of racial and political divisiveness. Like Everald Brown in Jamaica, Moore frequently uses polymorphic imagery, but his brilliantly coloured, symbol-laden pattern structures are even more intricate …"
In Art of the South African Townships Gavin Younge describes the involvement of the churches in black art training and the subsequent rise of community-based educational initiatives:
"Another important art centre was established in Natal in the early 1960s. A radio talk, given by the Swedish missionary Helge Fosseus, resulted in the formation of a committee which raised sufficient funds to enable Ulla and Peder Gowenius to come out to South Africa in 1961 and to start a weavery and art school at Umpumulo. Two years later this was moved to the Oskarsberg Mission at Rorke’s Drift. The weaving workshop was organized co-operatively and gave employment to local women and helped subsidize the school which was known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) Art and Craft Centre. A ceramic workshop, under Kirsten Ollson, was added in 1968.
A ex-principal of the school, Jay Johnson, has stated that the school and centre was established ‘to explore the possibilities of the arts and crafts as a means of livelihood.’ With this aim in mind the organizers have, perhaps not surprisingly, identified west Europeans as their potential market. This has led the weavery to concentrate on luxury wall and floor coverings using the finest wools and mohair. The weavers are responsible for the design and choice of colour and over the years a tradition of figurative tapestries with a strong autobiographical and narrative structure has evolved.
The largely foreign market and the fact that the weavery has not oriented itself towards a ‘village industry’ producing blankets and other locally useful goods has prompted allegations that the centre is organized along neo-colonial lines. The school has faced financial difficulties and the principal, Goran Skogland, was forced to close it temporarily at the end of 1982. However, in its twenty years of operation a number of young artists have successfully completed the two- and three-year Fine Art Certificate.
Together with Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo is probably the best known of these students and both have enjoyed international exposure and acclaim. Other students have become teachers. Anthony Nkotsi now teaches printmaking at the Johannesburg Art Foundation; Lionel Davis teaches at the Community Arts Project in Cape Town, and Velile Soha teaches at the Nyanga Arts Centre. Paul Sibisi, who studied at Rorke’s Drift in 1973 and 1974, won a British Council bursary in 1987 and is now a language teacher at the Umzuvela High School in Umlazi, Durban …
Mpolokeng Ramphomane’s painting For the Gift of Love is typical of the more tutored and sophisticated technique of artists living within commuting distance of Johannesburg. Nearly two metres wide, it is large in comparison with the work of other artists to have graduated from the ELC Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift. The nervous flick of brushstrokes in the background provides a bogus psychological space within which two lovers turn to face the viewer, their faces in sharp focus against a frieze of dark shadowy figures …
In 1981 his [Paul Sibisi’s] exhibition broke new ground, white viewers suddenly saw a reflection of what was going on in the closed world of the townships. His photo-journalistic treatment of police intervention in Umlazi Township also broke new ground technically. It was at this time that he began using a paint atomizer to lay down thin colour washes over ink drawings. The unusual, perhaps photographically inspired, cropping of his images, gave them added immediacy and when the critic Edward Lucie-Smith asked to be shown the work of some black artists, it was Paul Sibisi he was taken to see …
… Paul Sibisi acknowledges the influence of the nineteenth-century satirists (among them, Honoré Daumier, whose work he saw in reproduction whilst studying at Ndaleni College) but claims that his imagery is not politically motivated. ‘Artists should be above politics. I’m depicting what is happening on the street, the way I see it.’ …
Jackson Hlungwani has said that his work does not originate in himself but that ‘it comes from God Himself, and from the Lord, and from the Holy Spirit.’ He is not only referring to his sculpture, but also to his evangelistic work as the overseer of an African Independent Church called ‘Yesu Geleliya One Apostle in Sayoni Alt and Omega’ …
Although Hlungwani frequently refers to Christ as the source of life he makes little use of central Gospel themes. Instead, as Schneider notes, he dwells on one recurrent apocalyptic vision, ‘Heaven and Hell are about to be radically transfigured, and mankind will open its eyes. The old world of sin and strife is about to be replaced by the new world of forgiveness and brotherhood.’
… Seeing Straight is an idealized self-portrait. We see a man pointing forward with his whole body. Hands with long outstretched fingers guide the man’s gaze forward, like the blinders on a carthorse. But the real exhortation, to ‘see straight’, derives from a curios protruberance of raw, unworked wood which rises from the subject’s head. This, according to Hlungwani, is the ‘map’ by means of which people must live their lives. It is not a concrete representation of abstract thought, but life prefigured.
[John] Muafangelo’s work is strongly autobiographical and he often includes written observations on the events he portrays in his prints. What began as labelling device after his return from his second stay at Rorke’s Drift in 1975 quickly took on an important supplementary function. Whilst the text in Battle of Rorke’s Drift (1981) is little more than a title, his New Archbishop Desmond Tutu Enthroned (1986) includes a prayer asking for God’s help. This meshing of two narrative structures, text and image, gives his work a topical currency and, on occasion, historical importance …
… A number of prints deal with the bombing of church buildings at Onilpa. The image of Bishop Kauluma outside the boarded-up windows of the seminary at Odibo in Anglican Seminary Blown Up is a catechism on the principle of Christian forgiveness. In many other prints, notably New Archbishop Desmond Tutu Enthroned and Activity Centre, black and white people are shown shaking hands in ‘love and co-operation’. This was Muafangejo’s message to the world …"
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Jonathan Butler - Falling In Love With Jesus.
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