The Judgment of Paris

Both of my parents were avid readers and members of the San Fernando Library – that central hub of that little town – and my mother would bring home art books by the dozen which were my earliest education, so the images - even before I could tell the difference between photography and painting (art?) - were imprinted on my very psyche before almost anything else I can remember, in the same way we learn to eat or talk, instinctively.

One work more deeply embedded than any of the others was Rubens’ Judgment of Paris – if only because the ladies were naked and, well… fat – those vast landscapes of flesh, those amazing accoutrements of symbol and drapery, and the general electrifying baroque energy of it all, bouncing off the old hand worn pages, some of which were actually inscribed with obscene graffiti by other readers no doubt moved by the almost palpable erotic energy to express in their own way their own deep appreciation. Remember, this was long before pornography became anything as everyday as it is now, internet and cable weren’t even dreamed of, so this kind of picture would have been pretty much the only kind eroticism available out there, apart from blatant pornography – unfortunately, hypocritically, a distinction that is still unclear for most Trinis.

I’ve drawn The Judgment of Paris so many times I‘ve lost count. Something to do also, I think, with the business of beauty pageants (it must have been the very first recorded) – though in our case here, more specifically Carnival Queen Pageants; the business of threes (three goddesses); the business of deception (Aphrodite proffering Helen of Troy - the most beautiful woman in the world - as bribery for first place); the erotic current running through the whole story (don’t tell me Paris wasn’t aroused, or that Hermes who organized the whole thing isn’t a walking phallus himself – I mean, think of the herms, his image - rampant erections all over the cities of Greece); the challenge of formalizing the whole thing in terms of composition and symbolism; and of course just plain good ole storytelling.

So, here are a two of those images – one of the earliest, from around the very late 1980’s, from a series on the Iliad, and the latest, from as recently as last year. In the former, I differentiated and named the goddesses through their symbols – or I should say, my own personal symbols for them, hence (in the detail) the moon and water over Aphrodite’s head, since she was born of the sea – and the implication of the power of flight in the act of hovering rather than the actual wings on Hermes headdress and sandals - though they’re certainly there in the most recent drawing - and of course his more rampant erotic embellishments. Hera I gave the symbol of vegetable fecundity for her fertility, and Athene a beating heart symbolizing passion and the spilling of blood in war. I wonder what, if anything, Rubens would think!

As I said in one of the earlier posts, things are interchangeable – I mean subjects and representations – with a few adjustments – a fascinating thing to know and finally understand and USE, which only gives credence to the observation about there being really only a handful of subjects and stories in the very first place – and that nothing is ever NEW – not ever!

Nativity Triptych

The Nativity Triptych reads, from left to right, The Annunciation, The Adoration, and The Baptism.

I used the daily rituals of ablution and washing and the Baptists’ baptism at the river as settings for the famous biblical story, and hopefully these will have a familiar look to any Afro-Caribbean person born of the last century, at any rate - the adoption (in the way that we do here of everything North American) of Christian Fundamentalist Evangelism is probably making us more American by the day and less indigenous by the moment, alas! And the common childhood sight of the Baptist meeting at the corner is a rarity that is seldom seen nowadays.

I tried keeping this piece in the narrative traditions of the great Renaissance nativity paintings, but without the ostentatious display of wealth and privilege mandatory to the conventions of that day. In my work, the “folk” make their way through the forest to the holy family to pay homage, not without a little of the natural curiosity (macoshousness) of our people. The three Wise Men are wise rather than rich, reaching across the river of life to the infant, the mother and father.

In the Annunciation, the bringer of the news speaks only to Mary, or is it only She who sees and hears his message in the general tumult of the washday ritual? And in the Baptism, Jesus is anointed to the ringing of the Baptist bell, under the Baptist flags, and to the incantations of the women.

The Nativity Triptych was finished in 1993 (Crown of Thorns followed naturally out of this in the following years as part of the whole project on the life of Jesus). It was proposed for the newly refurbished St. Finbars Roman Catholic Church in Westmoorings, but the fee could not be raised by subscription or otherwise. It was reproduced (badly!) as a stained glass panel in the Our Lady Of Guadeloupe Roman Catholic Church in Paramin, high up in the Northern Mountain range of the island. It’s at home now in my own home in Santa Cruz, looking out the door at the cocoa trees and listening to the parrots as they fly through the estate raiding the fruit! I think this is where it belong

I suppose the opposite end of the story is The Resurrection, but that’s for

another time, if its to get its full and rightful treatment – The Resurrection (of the last posting here) is not intended to convey the momentousness of that huge and wonderful event – stressing more the intimacy of a more deeply private revelation.

The Crucifixion is in Maracas Valley, listening to the river flowing by just a few feet away outside my partner’s home, and happy there too, I think – except when the bars across the river start pumping out American Rap and Jamaican Dancehall music.

Left to right the panels read Gethsemane, The Crucifixion, The Entombment. The full-flowering Poui tree of the central panel of course represents renewal and benediction. The cloudless pure blue sky connotes eternity. It was shown in Crown of Thorns in 1998, as a contrasting foil to the gothic black and white of the rest of the exhibition, and to imply that life cannot proceed without death, that in fact death, in all its terrible beauty, is as much a part of daily existence as life is, is simply the darker of the two inextricable entwined partners of creation - my own understanding of the meaning of the story.

The location is one of the hundreds of little rock islands that shimmer and burn all day long in the relentless day-long sea-spray and sun off the North-Eastern Toco Coast of Trinidad, one of the most beautiful places on all this earth.