By
Paul Hope
These
pictures in this frame are quite special to me, as are the paintings
they have inspired. They represent the only pictures I have from the
early life of my father (Raymond Ronald) in Guyana, South America. There
are many reasons for their rarity, perhaps because of the fact that
in the early years of the 20th century photography was not as cheap
and accessible to working class people as now. Possibly, the value of
photographic mementos had yet to be established. It may even be that
my relatives had little interest in the recording of images for the
future. Add to this any other reasons, applicable to the sometimes random
process of the "natural selection" preserving the existence
of possessions. It was Duchamp who referred to museums, as repositories
of art, housing things that were just lucky enough to have survived
loss or destruction. Along these lines, it is perhaps another consideration
of selection, that on emigrating from Guyana to England, space was at
a premium and many things will have been left in the West Indies.
I believe it to be the most unusual, and not something that I much noted
among my father's friends and contemporaries, that my dad arranged for
his own parents and son (Raymond Neville) to emigrate to England. My
father also tried to arrange for his daughter (Vashti) to come to England,
some years later than Raymond, but she chose not to do so. In some way,
perhaps my father was able to cut his links with Guyana as he had brought
all that was important with him to England. For many others, an important
reason for returning to Guyana was to revisit what they had left behind.
So it is probable that one or both of these pictures, were at some time
the possessions of his parents. The picture with the tractor in the
background depicts my grandfather (Ablington HOPE) who is in the middle
with the hat. The picture of the shore scene is more likely to have
been taken by, or for, Ablington HOPE and kept by my father as a keepsake.
It was later found by me, in a little green folder used by my father
to keep his bus pass. Was it special? Does it depict persons known,
although unfocused and indistinct, we may never know? Is it a family,
work, or other scene? The only distinct things being three persons (males)
stood behind a dugout boat, and a person seated on a mooring post with
a suitcase. There are three persons to the right, and the person on
the extreme right appears to be a woman. I can only presume this picture
is of the interior of Guyana and may have been of persons and a place
known to my father or his father.
The job of my grandfather, in the logging industry, was a hard life
and required that he be away from home, living in the bush (interior)
for weeks on end. Perhaps coming home only several times within the
year. The objective of the lumber industry, being quite simple, to extract
trees from the dense interior and to prepare the rough-hewn trunks for
processing at the sawmill downriver. A place where roads do not exist,
the rivers are the ready-made thoroughfares. The camp for he logging
industry would be established near the river, with the wood cleared
around the camp and dragged to the riverbank. The trees levered into
the river, lashed together into makeshift rafts, with the more buoyant
trees added to stop denser trees sinking, before drifting them down-river.
In the event of the raft fouling or snagging, the job requires that
the raft be pulled back on line by the use of ropes pivoted around trees
standing around the riverside.
I have had both pictures enlarged, to aid closer examination, providing
the copies to the artist Ron Savory. Ron, after three years of letters
and phone calls, on my visit to St. Lucia, handed me the pictures in
January 2002. He had researched, the logging industry (references drawn
from the tractor photograph), and the logging camp (references from
the shore scene) from the limited references available to him, to give
life to the acrylic scene he created and entitled "Paul's View".
The title is perhaps more a reference to perspective and representing
visual impossibility, or a reference to the artist giving way to the
demands and persistence of his friend. I am proud that my painstaking
irritation, and demands on the impossibility of perspective, caused
Ron Savory to re-examine perspective and composition for the finished
work.
The aerial sketch,
has some of the components shown in the final picture - "Paul's
View" - and sought to capture my requirement of representing the
searing height of the forest canopy, distorting into visual impossibility
by trying to represent both the horizontal and vertical planes, as the
viewer looks out and up at the canopy. There was confusion over my proposal
as Ron Savory interpreted the combination of the horizontal and the
vertical plane, from an aerial viewpoint. My expectation was that he
would have approached the commission by the provision of a sketch with
a view from the ground up. This being the point of view I had seen in
his canopy series of paintings. The sketch, a worthy artwork in its
own right, not usually given by the artist as an original, is a most
welcome link to the creative process of "Paul's View".
Ron Savory lived for most of his life in Guyana and was employed for
a while in surveying the interior, which he painted. The origins of
his art, are recorded in letters and cuttings from our correspondence.
The provision of the "pork-knocker" is a more simple commission.
My own father spoke of these mythical workers in the bush, working to
find gold and diamonds on the edge of civilisation. The finished work
is more of an illustration, than a particular study, with the artist
trying to avoid making a copy of an earlier work. The full circle of
the association with Ron Savory, itself an interesting story, starts
with my writing to him on seeing his canopy of pictures in a Sunday
magazine, inviting him to contribute to my 2000 project and the commission
works collected by me in St. Lucia in January 2002 - with much correspondence
and telephoning in between and since.
In conclusion, I have read the above words and thought to myself "why
have I been moved or bothered to spend so much time and effort in this
attempt to interpret photographs in to art?" I believe that if
the fragment of past lives are to be seen, appreciated and enjoyed in
the present, whilst making the past accessible to future generations,
they cannot be left uncatalogued and without the provision contemporary
recollections. I have found great difficulty in coming to terms with
the possessions of deceased family members, those of my mother and father,
being the custodian of a random collection of dusty papers and pictures.
Believing that we tend to appreciate only what others have termed as
art, what I seek to make is family centred art. A cultural shift in
the precipitation of what is art, and what its function is. To provide
a more seamless overlap of the generations that individuals span. In
the process making clearer and better connections between possessions
and relatives.
In the draft and redrafted form of this piece of writing, the text has
been cut and pasted, mixed and deleted, leaving by chance the following
three sentences of an earlier drafted conclusion: "You can sometimes,
I believe, more easily wear the ring of a deceased relative. It is more
difficult for me to pick up old photographs, bearing the smell of the
past, with old dust from an old tin box. I hope to make it more easy
for my family to take away, value and understand both past and present
- or to ignore it for a later generation - by placing valued possessions
in context and treating them as family art works."
Perhaps no more explanation is required, but my mind is drawn to the
old 'Museum of Mankind', a favourite place of my youth, soon to become
part of the expanded 'Royal Academy' at the rear of Burlington Arcade.
The earlier museum housed the ethnography (comparative study of peoples)
collection of the 'British museum', and within it's collection so much
that was considered in purely artistic terms. I now believe, in reality,
the collections represented many tribal and family possessions. The
collection of Mexican skulls, covered in elaborate minute turquoise
tiles, were not made without reference to the deceased. The question
to pose, as an examination of this is, would the turquoise tiles have
been applied to those particular skulls if the deceased had meant nothing
to the persons commissioning the work? I suggest that honouring a specific
person and memory was central to the works creation. Similarly, the
Benin bronzes represented the cultural past of a tribe, the method of
which their history was recorded for prosperity. To differentiate tribal/social
art, from more cultural creations such as jewellery, is to allow us
to examine where a museum may have appropriated significant familial
objects and reduced them to ethnographic art. In this way, and by means
of this examination, I hope to have provided a new context to the possessions
that are for me family art.
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