Unrestrained

 

Norma sleeping

In recent weeks I have been searching through diaries and images that go back to my far beginnings. In terms of my work with the nude this pencil sketch of my first wife Norma sleeping represents one of my earliest attempts in that genre. It dates from over fifty years ago.

It has been said that the artist has no enemy but time. Life is too short for learning the skills and putting them into effect. I have spent a lifetime learning those skills and I have yet to say all I have to say. 

Below is a more recent attempt to get the message across. Given time, I hope to say more. 

Unrestrained

The Hidden Persuaders

Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957, reveals how advertisers discreetly access and manipulate our desires. Recently, Caribbean online news sites have become awash with full breasted females titillatingly offering their services. They pop up at random regardless of the news item's content. Thus, you may find the above image under a funeral announcement or a school prize giving.

Ironically, the adds are made possible courtesy of Google, the very same Google that is censorious of innocent paintings and sculptures of nude. If that doesn't smack of double standards, I dread to think what else may qualify.

Once again I bring this video to your attention. It beautifully reveals the anomaly. 

What's wrong with this picture?

Many years ago one of Dominica's Carnival calypsos went something like this:

            I’ve got me left shoe on de right foot,

            I’ve got me buttons in de wrong hole,

            And me bucket, it got a hole.

            I’m working hard, both day and night,

            But nothing’s going right.

Those lyrics sum up the frustrations of the last seven days. I depend on my broadband connection for these diary posts and lots more besides. My fiber-optic cable swings pole to pole, three miles up the valley to reach me. Over a week ago, it blew down, and it hasn't been fixed as yet. I've only been able to hurriedly make this post by borrowed means.

Back to the picture. My Chinese clock stopped working the right way up, and now only works upside down. Perhaps that's why my portrait busts of Alice and Albert are askew. Like me they've been twisting their heads to tell the time.

Just a little bit more frustration to add to the foot of the account.

Tell me about it, but say something nice

The vexation that prompts the request, tell me about it, can answered by the artist by way of music, painting, poetry or prose, providing the recipient isn't necessarily expecting to hear something nice. And therein lies the problem, for as artists, more often than not, we are expected to say something nice. 

To fulfill that expectation, my book Caribbean Sketches would have had to contain sanitized drawings of palm fringed beaches, rather than an uncensored record of life as it was lived in the islands.

Field workers on the island of Grenada

And in the higher enclaves of jazz, this is Billie Holiday telling you about it.