Words by Tishanna Williams
Photos by Colin Williams
Dr. LeRoy Clarke is a force to be reckoned with. If his extensive repertoire of artwork, poetry and essays spanning half a century doesn’t awe you, go to Trinidad and meet the man. We dare you. His imposing figure belies a quick smile and a mischievous wit that will have you laughing one minute, and wondering how you got caught up in serious conversations on philosophy and art the next. He is, most who know him would agree, Trinidad’s most internationally prolific and nationally controversial living artist.
Hailing from “Behind The Bridge” in Gonzales, Belmont, Dr. Clarke is a self-taught artist, writer, philosopher and one of only two persons bestowed with the title of Master Artist by the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago. He was also awarded the Yoruba title “Chief Ifa’ Oje’ Won Yomi Abiodun” by the Orisha shrine Ile Eko Sango/Osun MiI’Osa, which when translated means, “He Who Cannot Be Rebuked.”
This is a man of stories. From his days scraping red brick and clays in water to make the paints that he was too poor at the time to afford, LeRoy Clarke has always believed he was destined for greatness. He offers a particularly remarkable origination story regarding his birth: becoming pregnant before marriage, his mother was contemplating suicide by throwing herself off of the Port of Spain jetty when she was accosted by the Yoruba spirit of the ocean, Yemanja, with the words, “Suppose you don’t dead, you will shame your family.”
As a young man in the late 1950s, Clarke was the vocalist for the band, The Beamers, and a primary school teacher, but very soon his true calling took him on a journey that led to his eventual status as Master Artist. His first solo art show, “Labour of Love,” was shown at the Bank of Nova Scotia in Port of Spain in 1966, and soon after he was exhibiting in Brazil, Canada and the US, where he eventually relocated, following the woman who would become his first wife. It was during this time he wrote his suite of still unpublished poems, “Fragments of A Spiritual” and created a corresponding collection of work, which was first shown at the Studio Museum of Harlem. “Fragments” quickly became a catalyst, as he became the Studio Museum of Harlem’s first Artist in Residence, from 1972-1975. He was also part of the “100 Years of American Art” exhibition in Philadelphia, 1970.
Dr. Clarke returned to Trinidad in 1980 with a vision of uplifting his people through his work, output that has continued to speak to issues of national importance, Afrocentricity, and discovery of self. Whether it’s for the emotional and psychological shock of his paintings and drawings or simply to hear what will come out of his mouth, he has continued to be sought out by young and old, who travel from various parts of the world to experience him.
Our own photographer extraordinaire Colin Williams caught up with the Master Artist in February, at the National Museum in Port of Spain, where his latest work, “Eye.. Hayti…Cries… Everywhere,” comprised of 110 acrylic drawings, was being shown.
Colin next spent time with the artist at his residence, known as “De Legacy House of El Tucuche,” in Cascade, Trinidad—so called because, to Clarke, El Tucuche, the second highest mountain on the island, is the highest point of man and his achievements, second only to Aripo, the highest mountain in Trinidad—and, for him, where God resides.
“What was most interesting about his work was also him,” Colin says of his time spent with Clarke, who does not often grant interviews or sit for photographs. “In Trinidad a few years ago, I was about to leave a small live house where a friend had just got off stage, when I noticed a striking older man in African attire. It took me a few minutes to really take him in because he had a lot going on. Like no other older man I saw in Trinidad in my recent visits. He had a walk of an Old Lion, but the younger ones respected who he was.”
A few years later, they connected on Facebook. “I saw LeRoy Clarke in a picture with a friend of mine. I was taken aback that he had a Facebook page. So I added him, he replied and from that day it was all about trying to know about his work in Trinidad and Tobago. I hope my images will compel or provoke interest in LeRoy Clarke’s work and story.”
Scroll through for a photographic window into Clarke’s life and career, narrated by the artist himself.
The Master Artist with visitors, at the National Museum, Port of Spain, Trinidad
I have a way of saying I am the most popular person in the world. The reason for that is paradoxical since I am probably the most unpopular. Unpopular because of my views, which I hold on [to] quite steadily. You can’t help but approach me as someone who has some form of identity. I stand for certain things, and do not bend away from it.
Of late, when there seems to be nothing more, or so much more… less, there is a little gratification that I have spanned three or four generations. I teach because I want people to surpass me. This is fundamental to my nature. The schools have to decide to bring me in, and that comes from the adults. The adults fear me, and what may come out of my mouth.
Drawings from “Eye… Hayti… Cries…Everywhere”
Around 1968, I showed “Fragments of A Spiritual.” It was the first exhibition that showed the psychological analysis of the social and spiritual state of the individual. A series based on the search for self. I offered my country that as a guide or inspiration for climbing up into being-ness. Since then, I have developed a philosophical approach to becoming because, like Haiti, I for one suffered under my own weight.
Daughter Adaeze Clarke, “De Mango of My Eye”
There is so much confusion of ideas, and a hunger for technology. Technology is taking over, and humanity has no space. It’s moved from walking into the bush to see a tree to taking your phone to photograph it. Then there is the newest craze. The selfie. Selfies are one of the most obnoxious things. You have to take a selfe to know you are alive. You cannot walk in your own presence. What time do you have to absorb our surroundings? We are becoming second citizens. Technology uses us. We have to be careful. Art in its truest sense takes on these things.
Installing the collection at The National Museum
It is difficult to talk about the work. The best way to talk about the work is to view the work.
Legacy House, the residence of Dr. LeRoy Clarke, Cascade, Trinidad.
Long ago, the dusk invited you to dream again for romance. Who thinks of romance in the middle of the day except longing for the day to pass, for the afternoon to pass and for the sun to settle. For the birds to coo and your heart to coo as well, for it is in arrangement with the environment. I can talk like that, because my art is like that. That is what I do with my painting and my writing. This is what I create with Legacy House. An invitation to dream.
Work/ Gallery Space at Legacy House
Where I live creases my brow. The gaze is so severe and intense. The gravity is my concern, that there is something beyond all this shit that is me, and I must look past that shit to see me. That is why one may say there is an audacity about me. I am occupied by the beyondness of me.
I can be tenacious but it’s all in the passion of eating up things. And if I have to eat up some people along the way, that does not bother me. In any form. That is kind of brutal but my history is paved with that. My ancestors came here under that situation. I am a survivor. I compare myself to ‘living deads.’ I am not that. My spirit is as alive as any ancestor.
Lounge/ Art Space at Legacy House
I am ready to be forsaken by anybody. What is precious is something inside my head that I am moving towards. If people cannot sit with me and have a conversation, don’t come. You are disturbing me.
We wallow and play in what appears to be the norm. But when we dig into it, we have no ideas of what informs the objective. Such utterances can only come from a personal, intense vocation.
LU: And your vocation would be art, poetry…
I am arting myself
LU: So you are your art?
I am my art.
A painting entitled, “In The Maze. A Single Line to My Soul”
When you engage the object, a line is drawn between both. The object is also engaging you in a surrealistic way. The thing is longing to see you. But my attitude in terms of phenomenology is: That thing has a life that is not familiar to you, and therefore it is receiving vibrations from you.
You know of incidents where people looking at plants and the plants die? Once up at my place in Aripo, a young girl walking to the shop stopped to stare at a plant in my yard. She stayed there a while and said how beautiful it was. The next morning I woke up, and it was dead. I take things into consideration when ‘arting’ myself. So too the space is also ‘arting’ me. I have to be on my guard. Particularly now.
My spaces have bits of shock to them. I like space but I like to people the space with things that cause your eyes to play tic tac toe. You can’t enter my room and focus on one point. You are constantly moving from point to point. Contrast.
All these little things, the quantums of the space forming an orchestral order. Harmony in disharmony. I am very conscious of harmony and disturbed by disharmony. Yet I can appreciate discord, because it is the challenge for me to find self. I go into noise, in terms of sound and arrangement, and I must find order.
Color is just like words and sound. You have to find formula. With hard work, you arrange what you want.
I moved my music closer to me. I can enclose myself in that. Music adds to my space. Miles Davis, Coltrane. I lay, my hands in the air, eyes closed. This is the best part of the day. I am wafted away from confusion and all expectation that may disappoint. And I start to think of a stack of paper 11”x8”. I am going to paint that experience. Eight verses. Each painting a verse.
I have a poem which says: “To see light and not touch it, I myself will become such a mess of popular sadness. Rather forsake this tomb to go tipping on water, to nest in a lullaby of light. Fossil of confusion”
This is the heart of the space, but it is a space that is reserved. I don’t know if I made it so or if it evolved that way. The functions in the house somehow yield away from it, so in a way it remains the most private space.
Music can play all day and all night. With music, my space is filled, where before it was empty of the sound of your voice. Just before you came in, I was floating. I put that iPod in my ear, and listen to some of the best music. My hands lift into the air, floating on wind, decoding what I hear. There is an ad on BBC where a young boy describes an experience and his voice crescendos as he tried to speak, but now it isn’t the music coming from somewhere else but the strings in his emotion. His own emotion became a harp.
We do not dream anymore. I spoke to a woman recently. We were born in neighboring hospital beds. We re-met when I was six years old. I loved her since then. She was a teacher. I am now able to tell her how I love her. I once read her a section of my autobiography, and that lady just cried to know that someone loved her like that. I am talking about how she, as an object of my primal affection, became a signal for me in life that lit a light on the objects of my affection.
When I look at myself and realise I had been made over by circumstances that contested my own authorship, I began saying I was full of shit—a dustbin for their waste. A fragment of my own spiritual. If more youths would be put into that struggle… confronting their image… they will see they are fragments. No history, no nothing.
LU: Do you think you have gotten out of it?
I think probably. [I] am not totally out of it but getting out of it is no longer my option. What I am focusing on has nothing to do with that state. For me the tragedy would be looking back too much. I am looking forward.
Someone did this mural of me in an old building in Bishops. I met the guy. He could be about 30. They deny the youths who have more potential than they have or ever had. But Trinidad is like that. They big up people who have no real talent. There are many people who have great work but they deny them for others who can take us nowhere. When people speak of art, if they could talk of it at all, whether it be with adulation or bitterness, they have to mention LeRoy Clarke. I am a gifted person and whether people like you or not, once you are gifted you shine in their darkness and confusion, because you are opposite to where they dwell.
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