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.