About Me
The Architect of Impossible Physics
By Simon Lee (aka ”The Inspector”)
It would be disingenuous to dissimulate, or in Trinidad parlance play “the mocking pretender” (empty hyperbolic windbag) or even attempt to “mamaguy” (fool) those of you who have strayed from the drawings, an amazement unto themselves, into this textual morang and sometime meringue. What follows lays no claim to art criticism, although some of it might be. It is neither objective nor detached, as I have known the artist for close on 30 years, arriving in this Trinidada the same year as The Architect of Impossible Physics found his way onto the drawing board.
Disclaimers aside, what I can offer are some responses based on life experience and the accumulated research of more than 40 years into Caribbean culture, high and low, popular, folk, rootical, theoretical, historical and supernatural. That’s some of the background, which would also include countless research trips and ‘deep limes’ across the entire region from Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and The Dominican Republic) and Jamaica in the north, all the way down south to Cayenne in Guyane (French Guyana) and the infamous Devil’s Island. En route I’ve met prime ministers and ganja farmers, fishermen and bush doctors, beer brewers and rum distillers, artists and vendors, Vodou, Kali and Orisha priests, cricketers and stickfighters, musicians and hitmen.
If you’re into credentials, you’ve just had some of mine, as I’m convinced, unlike a distinguished academic who’s widely recognized in academe as an expert on Haitian literature but has never set foot in Haiti, that to discuss, or comment on any aspect of culture, one must know the land and seascapes, the his and her stories of provenance and the people who made them. Position and context, point of view –are all more than relevant. Any cultural theorizing or discourse, such as this, must be based on primary research. Organic, as opposed to the cerebral style of theory (largely western and burdened with such schismic titles as structuralism, post structuralism, post modernism, post colonialism) begins with the practice, from which theory is derived. Otherwise theory is disconnected, a cart before the proverbial horse, as practice does not conform to (existing) theory but begets it.
And while the Caribbean is inextricably entangled with Western discourse and has produced postmodern analysis of culture –notably Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, Caribbean theory like Caribbean new knowledge is (must by definition) be generated here, which is the centre, rather than from a distant metropolis, which is peripheral to our purposes. As José Martí observed in his seminal 1891 essay Nuestra America (which reclaims the name of the region from Yankee monopoly) “The European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught…even if the archons of ancient Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours. We need it more…Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the tree must be our own.”
One hundred years later Benitez-Rojo gives his brilliant analysis of Creole ontology, in his discussion of Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint, which he suggests should be read as a ‘dialogic and uncentered text:
Of course, according to the canons of Western scientific thought, much of what there is in the Contrapunteo is absurd, irrational, fantastic. But one must admit that the same could be said from the other side, if one looked from the periphery towards the centres of disciplinary power, although the periphery, it should be said, tends to be more tolerant. Nevertheless, given its logocentric character, Western theoretical thinking discards any relativist schema and says merely that certain Caribbean points of view “don’t hold up under modern analysis’ or are marginal to postmodernity’s “brainstorm”. One example among many would be the importance that Ortiz gives to the impact of African beliefs in the Caribbean.
…We can understand better if we see that African beliefs don’t limit themselves to the worshipping of a given group of deities, but rather inform an authentic body of sociocultural practices extending through a labyrinth of referents as diverse as music, dance, theatre, song, dress, hairstyle, crafts, oral literature, systems of divination, medical botany, magic, ancestor cults, pantomime, trance states, eating customs, agricultural practices, relations with animals, cooking, commercial activity, astronomical observation, sexual behaviour, and even the shapes and colours of objects. Religion in black Africa is not something that can be separated from, distinguished from history, since it is, in itself, history; we’re dealing here with a discourse that permeates all human activity and interferes in all practices.
We will find resonances of ‘the absurd, irrational, fantastic’ throughout The Architect of Impossible Physics, which I suggest works on several levels like Ortiz’s Contrapunteo to create and interrogate Creole space, the magical real or tropical baroque; an iconography-cum-epistemology, a mythology grounded in the specific eco-scape of Trinidad yet constantly shifting, drifting in the same Caribbean Sea which embraces, unites and separates the repeating islands.
Another relevant theorist much closer to home is the Trinidadian C.L.R. James, whose pioneering work in conceptualizing Creole ontology, displacing the dominant Western narrative and centering the periphery is still under-recognized. ‘To establish his own identity, Caliban…must pioneer into regions Caesar never knew’, James wrote in the preface to his seminal text Beyond A Boundary, which has as much claim to being the first Cultural Studies text (cricket as visual art, drama, field of racial and class analysis) as Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World (1949) does to be the first magical realism text –rather than Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (1966). Formally educated in the English public school system (by Oxbridge ex-pat teachers at Queen’s Royal College, Port-of-Spain) James would free himself from mental slavery; ‘It was only long years after that I understood the limitation on our spirit, vision and self respect that was imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum…everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn.’
James challenged Western historiography and virtually single-handedly established Caribbean historiography in the Anglophone Caribbean with his Black Jacobins (1938), a ground-breaking study of the Haitian Revolution, in which he argued that the beginning of modern Caribbean History dates from 1804, when the ex-slaves won independence, rather than from the 1492 arrival of Columbus. In his ‘yard literature’ -the early short story Triumph (1927) and novel Minty Alley (1936) -James privileged Creole barrack yard popular culture, documenting and celebrating this site in much the same way he celebrated the Creole space of the cricket pitch, which to West Indian spectators in the twentieth century was much more than simply a playing field: ‘I know that to tens of thousands of coloured Trinidadians the unquestioned glory of St Hill’s batting conveyed the sensation that here was one of us, performing in excelsis in a sphere where competition was open. It was a demonstration that atoned for pervading humiliation and nourished pride and hope.’
So that’s some of my theoretical framework, not forgetting my pal Anténor Firmin (the Haitian anthropologist and friend of Marti), the original Creole Confederate and the man who trounced European pseudo-scientific racism- à la Gobineau- with his De l’égalité des races humaines (On the Equality of the Human Race –“all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal”).
And the final theorist up for consideration who I find most relevant to our relational Creole subject, is the Martiniquan Édouard Glissant (classmate of Franz Fanon and student of Aimé Césaire at the Lycee Schoelcher, Martinique), whose concept of Antillanité, or Caribbeanness, engages so productively with the concept of rhizomic or horizontal, rather than vertical roots and does much to frame the region’s inherent chaos and paradoxical nature. Vertically we’re divided by language, different colonial histories, politics, but horizontally we share common experiences –of pre-Columbian history and indigenous societies, genocide, slavery, indentureship, resistance, Afro-Creole religions and cultural expressions –and most significantly by the process of creolization, which is the dynamic driving Caribbeanness.
Hybridity, transculturation, mestizaje, creolization – all terms which attempt definitions of the indefinable, although creolization (in its early sense of ‘made in the Caribbean’) says it best. Whether the analogy for this incessant (in- and un-intentional) mixing is Fernando Ortiz’s ajiaco (a soup of limitless combinations) or the favoured callaloo of the eastern Caribbean, the mix defines the Caribbean, and defies to the point of irrelevance notions of purity (racial as well as cultural), essentialism and fundamentalism, which is fanaticism’s ally. The linearity of western rationalism is constantly contradicted by the ebb and flow of the sea –everything is moving; our ‘magical reality’ mocks the stasis and limitations of western thought, which is why chaos theory is so relevant to our spaces. As Haitian polymath, writer and multi-media artist Frankétienne who rejects realism and embraces disorder, finding order in chaos says: “I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life.”
Moving from theoretical background –which will give you a contextualising handle if you want one- we’ll slide sidewise, rhizomically to the personal foreground. In this foreground I place a friendship, which has evolved through mutual respect, many libations, culinary concoctions and a shared love of and fascination with Sans Souci, a heartland haven on Trinidad’s Atlantic blasted north coast, one of those unique and special places in life’s landscape. The name itself resonates through Caribbean history- the fabulous palace constructed by crazy King Henri Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution which realized the potential of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality and universality, only to perpetrate fresh horrors on its own people, as we can read in the first text of “the magical real”, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World or in Edouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint.
Trinidad’s Sans Souci – the place of ‘no worries’ – has a far less august history than that of the ruins of a dream in northern Haiti, which remain to contradict the motto of its founder- Je renais de mes cendres (I arise from my ashes). Yet this small village, peopled by descendants of Vincentians and Grenadians brought into the island to secure votes, is as contradictory as its Haitian namesake. The visual and topographical clichés of Caribbean tourism –pristine white sands, still warm aquamarine waters – are challenged by the ever roaring ocean which can swallow you in the blink of an eye, the jagged black rocks where rip tides will smash and lacerate you, by the dense rainforest which drops sheer to the beach, where rainstorm beating on galvanise summons Shango drums.
Elemental land, sea and soundscape dominate Sans Souci, just as they shape all aspects of Caribbean culture and its diverse expressions, whether oral, visual, written, sung, danced or played. Thankfully Sans Souci is way off any beaten track, far behind God’s back. It requires effort to get there – a three-hour drive from Port-of-Spain, on serpentine roads so easy to slip off if you don’t know the way. When you reach the inconsequential village straddling the road after Big Bay there are no bijou beach bars serving tropical cocktails, although you’ll hear Roots Reggae or ragged Seventh Day Adventist hymns drifting through the trees, mingling with the ocean’s incessant percussion. Here you are stripped of all comfortable clichés, here is only monumental sea and forest, a kinetic vision, which if you allow, will slough off all veneers, beginning with ridiculous anthropocentrism, that foolish conceit of our own importance, as though the world this little speck of infinity, revolves around us.
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational
(Satyr on Mankind –John Wilmot Earl of Rochester)
The gift and spirit of Sans Souci reminds us of both our insignificance (the ocean will still be roaring, the high woods reaching for the stars in clear night skies, king corbeaux riding warm air currents overhead, long after we have gone), and also the significance of our place in the landscape.
The journey to Sans Souci can be a pilgrimage but when you reach there is no escape. The place confronts you, Sans Souci in your face, your ears, a thousand mosquitoes and breeze on your skin. For hermit or artist, musician or writer this is far more than a retreat, or refuge. There are no distractions beyond sea song and leaf storm; but you can spend an afternoon listening to the groans of ancient mahogany, harmonizing with the surf. Souci will embrace you with its challenge, as ceaseless as the incipient threat of ocean, sometimes, in rare moments as flat as ironed sheets but ready at wind gust to churn and wrench, a cavalcade of sea elephants trumpeting, trampling, stampeding to shore.
Shadow on the shore (181216)
Shadow on the shore
Line wavers smashed and shuddered
By ocean’s fury
I first met Eddie back in 1989 when I worked in an advertising agency next door to the Crossover Designs office/gallery where he was based on Woodford Street, in the genteel decrepitude of Woodbrook, Port-of-Spain’s gingerbread suburb. In my late thirties and self-exiled (rootless and confused as my pappi would say) from England, I was new to the capital, having spent the previous two years in the east, where I initially taught at a secondary school as a Commonwealth Exchange teacher. A former friend, now turned virulent enemy, once accused me in Sans Souci of all places of “being on safari” in Trinidad and the Caribbean. He was wrong, as unlike many Motherlanders, I had no intention of returning either to the UK or Europe.
Unlike the Lord Kitchener, London was not the place for me, even if I was born there. Of Russian and Polish Jewish extraction, England always felt alien to me; I didn’t get the sensibility (the climate and food didn’t help). I can still recall the immense relief I experienced on a hitch hiking tour of Morocco during a long summer vacation from university, when I climbed a peak in the Rif Mountains and surveyed the distant Mediterranean Sea, which separated me from Europe, which I willingly shed, like unwanted old baggage.
With the same kind of ennui/anomie, which I imagine demotivated nineteenth century fin de siècle dilettantes, Orientalists and exoticists and then twentieth century wannabe avant gardists, assorted modernists, Dadaists and surrealists (Gaugin, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Dali, Breton and the mob of unusual suspects), by my teens I was weary of Europe and the west. A backdrop of the swinging sixties, anti-Vietnam War and anti-Apartheid demonstrations, Youth culture, expanded consciousness courtesy widely available drugs and the global consensus that the revolution was upon us and a brave new world imminent –all impelled me to realize my childhood fantasy of finding my home in the kingdom of this world.
A period of dabbling in Trotskyism and then Buddhism was followed by an intense and much longer period of reading, African, Asian and Caribbean literature (initially as part of a project to introduce relevant texts to London’s secondary schools and their disaffected ethnic minority students). My reading introduced me to Trinidad and the Caribbean. I spent hours on London’s underground Circle line, transfixed by CLR James’ Black Jacobins. Voraciously I gobbled down Ralph de Boissiere, Albert Gomes, Alfred Mendes, both Naipauls along with Selvon, Lovelace, Harold “Sonny” Ladoo. Trinidad was calling and after several false starts I finally arrived in a hot green night. Within weeks I knew I had come home, had found my place in the world. Unconsciously at this stage, I began to construct my new ‘Jewish Creole’ identity.
When I stumbled up the stairs to Crossover Designs in 1989 and encountered Messrs Bowen and Ouditt, I found kindred spirits despite my decade and some seniority. What I didn’t know then was that Eddie had only returned two years before from a long sojourn in England, where like other members of Trinidad’s white or well-heeled elite, he’d been sent aged seven to be educated. Like me he was trying to find his place and space, although unlike me his family roots in the Caribbean are several centuries old. Another coincidence which I missed early, was that Eddie had nurtured ambitions of being an architect (“But I suck at Maths”) like my late father Maitre Levi, who went to view the first solo exhibition in London, of The Architect of Impossible Physics shortly after I wrote my first article about Eddie, previewing the show, which appears below.
The Amazing Power of the Pencil
(Trinidad Sunday Guardian magazine July 25, 1993)
In the process of psyching himself up for his October exhibition at the Aquarela Gallery, artist Eddie Bowen has returned to the drawing board. Already well known as one of the Caribbean’s young experimental painters, Eddie has produced a series of 36 large-scale drawings, which range from the intricately symbolic to the satirically irreverent. He describes them as “an economic way to work towards composition and exercises digging into the imagination.”
Glancing through the series in his St Ann’s studio, while his sage cat Snowy puts to flight a friendly but silly puppy who has strayed into forbidden territory, one cannot help but recall the evaluation of his former Crossover Design colleague Steve Ouditt: “The man is a boss draughtsman, the best in the island.”
Eddie himself seems pleased with the drawings, which are coming at the rate of two a day: “I always go back to drawing, I have to get back to (what is) my bliss…it’s like turning on the TV, you have to tune it in; sometimes there’s bad weather and you have to go back and re-tune.”
While he says that he begins each drawing with no preconceived ideas but merely with a scribble, the series reflects questions and research he has been engaged in recently and can be viewed as a meditation on the themes of inspiration and the creative power of prayer, the invoking of the gods of creativity and the imagination.
In The Architect of Impossible Physics we can see a Buddha figure from whose eye a black tear is falling. The Buddha (or architect of the title) is weeping, explains Eddie, because these days he rarely gets to build amazing structures, like those which characterized the cultures of ancient civilizations, like the Mayas and the Incas.
The Buddha/architect sits above a row of symbols, his building blocks, because his ability to build “impossible structures” derives from concepts contained in the symbols. To the left of the architect we see several of his amazing structures, which significantly rest on a layer of sand, conventionally regarded as the worst possible building foundation. The sand serves to emphasize the power of inspiration, the outrageous possibilities of creativity. Eddie draws attention to the Buddha’s face: “He’s not into can’t do.”
The series originated in collaboration with (fellow artist) Francisco Cabral. Eddie produced some drawings of figures in mas costumes for Cabral’s initial work on his designs for next years’s Barbarossa carnival band. The collaboration came to nothing but led Eddie directly into his series of drawings.
In the process of returning full time to drawing he has found himself re-working themes and motifs, which appeared in the drawings he did when he first came back to Trinidad after (Croydon) art school in England. Those who are familiar with his paintings will see the extended imagery of basic shapes (the box, the circle) in the drawings along with a mixing of tropical and technological motifs, which reflect the modern Caribbean lifestyle.
The titles, like the work are provocative, intense, humorous, satirical, mystical, densely wrought: The Incredible Cocoon Machine, The Great Fried Chicken Scandal, A Seed Propagation Tank, The Tree That Bowed to the Yogi.
The standard of draughtmanship, the intricacy of detail and the unleashing of a unique imagination demand that this series is exhibited in its own right.
Across the top of The Great Fried Chicken Scandal we read in Eddie’s flowing hand “…in the dead of night, the imagination runs riot with possibility, things we’d like to forget in the light of dawn…” His drawings attest to both the outrageous possibilities of the imagination and to the fact that, like the poet in Cocteau’s film Orphée, Eddie is attuned to his muse. After all, as he says, “The pencil can do amazing things if you push it.”
Thirty years on, immersing myself in the extraordinary series of drawings, which I’ve watched evolve, it occurs to me that in one way – there are many others- the Architect of Impossible Physics has come to represent Eddie’s discovery and mapping of his vision(s) and continuous re-visioning of his place in this place/space and a career in Fine Art practice, which he’s made up, utilizing his Creole talent for improvisation. He’s invented himself and a unique practice. Beginning with the early minimalist series, which he exhibited in London in 1993, he’s been navigating, documenting and mapping those internal landscapes encountered and explored since he returned to Trinidad in 1986.
We move from the sparseness and single images of the early drawings, where he plays and experiments with basic shapes, like a child’s building blocks, through the whimsical Heath Robinsonesque series of eco-machines and appliances for astral travel or holistic medicine devices (cf: Two devices and machines for the repair and restoration of angels’ wings: discovered in Trinidad 12 October 2007) to the increasingly dense, baroquely intricate complexity of the dimension-defying landscapes of the last two decades. Like Chagall’s Vitebsk, or RK Narayan’s fictional Malgudi, Eddie has created his own world, complete with its own mythology (cf. The Jumbie Killer series), symbolism, an imaginary, which precisely because it is now so rooted, can be viewed universally.
Souci afternoon
All day long the old fisherman
Sits roadside mending his nets
At the parlour round the next bend
Matrons in white sit kerbside
Sampling their homemade ice cream.
I bought a $5 cornet
And took a walk into the valley
Looking for a house spot.
Followed the cold clear stream
Until I’d’ve had to ford it.
On reflection I’d prefer
Somewhere on this ridge
Overlooking the waves.
For more than 30 years the Trinidadian artist Edward “Eddie”, Bowen, familiarly known by this member of the Sans Souci Militia as Von Gusto, Busha, Rocket Man and other transient titles, which have slipped into the waves, has been producing a series of drawings, The Architect of Impossible Physics, which you’ll encounter in some pages time. UK-based art critic Leon Wainright, a specialist in contemporary Caribbean art, contends that The Architect “is possibly the single longest running series of work in the English Caribbean” while the architect himself presents us with the vital lens through which we enter the series’ labyrinth, affirming it “was inspired by Sans Souci; the drawings like Sans Souci have no end.” We’ll return endlessly to Sans Souci but for now we’ll backtrack to the eighties.
Retour a Sans Souci (240607)
Sitting on the back porch. The sea a smoothed expanse of aquamarines streaked with indigo. As cloud coverage shifts so do the sea’s colours: from the bar below in the village, rain falling, it looked grey. The reflected body blow of the road’s bare heat bit into bones. This spot has always been a retreat, sanctuary, refuge. Since I reach, the roar of the sea has been with me, a deep massage, expelling toxic vapours. Simbi I will paint you in the surf percussion.
The Dialect of Hurricanes – Frankétienne
Every day I use the dialect of lunatic hurricanes.
I speak the madness of clashing winds.
Every evening I use the patois of furious rains.
I speak the fury of waters in flood.
Every night I talk to the Caribbean islands in the tongue of hysterical storms. I speak the hysteria of the rutting sea.
Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of tempests. Unravelling of the spiralling life.
La Pluie nan San Souci – synthanaesia suite
- Record rain on galvanise with sea background from house at San Souci
- Multi-track: drums, percussion; melody (violin, flute, voice)
- Three movements based on melodic motifs for sea, forest and rain
This is a basis for improvisation: over ambient sound track (1) a further sound layer (2) provides clave-rhythmic root track, over which live or recorded music can be dubbed (3).
Like the later drawings in The Architect, this project is endless. Any combination of musicians, or soloists can improvise their own responses to the first two tracks. The cumulative recordings will be a soundbank, as incessant as the sea at San Souci.
Eddie began The Architect in 1987, as a young man, shortly after his return from “exile” in England in 1986, having graduated from Croydon Art School. The title for the series came six months after beginning but The Architect’s essential open-endedness, its connections to the pre-historic past and infinity, the land and the sea were there from genesis: “I knew I wasn’t going to stop; maybe this doesn’t have an end.” 30 years on, we can view The Architect as one man’s journey, a voyage into the fecund empty spaces of the imagination: “It’s a bit like Alladin’s cave – full of treasures. I’ve been allowed in the cave; it’s dark in there. It’s like wearing a blindfold, feeling your way and drawing what you feel…it’s a kind of plastic darkness, you’re not just groping at objects, but at the empty space.”
If the origins of The Architect are similar to those of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), unlike Césaire, Eddie denies he has “ a big story to tell about the world’. Although he may share the surrealists’ commitment to freedom and subversion, their respect for the ‘marvellous’ (cf. Andre Breton “The marvelous is always beautiful.”), his sense of humour and definite taste for the divine comedy of life separate him from the suffocating seriousness, pomposity and rigid dismissiveness of the surrealists. The freedom Eddie seeks in both his paintings and drawings is not based on an essentializing ideology or a Manichean manifesto but on “acutely observing the world”.
Western theory aside (the author is dead, long live the text! Or – painting and drawing are finished, irrelevant in the postmodern era) we can examine and muse on Eddie’s antecedents as well as his own story, all of which contribute to an appreciation, if not interpretation, of the world he has created, the web spun and still spinning.
It’s quite possible that one branch of his white creole family are descendants of pirates, who’ve made a home for themselves in the Caribbean since the early 17th century. Apocryphal family history has it that Chacachacare or Chacachacarey, (island of Carey- one of the islands in the Bocas, the sea gauntlet you have to run through the Dragon’s Mouth to reach Trinidad’s coastal waters) was named for an ancestor, presumably of Irish extraction.
Bloodline tracks (2007)
In San Souci, on suicidally promising cliffs, the waterways north and the Carib highway, unfold beyond the roar of tides. Vincentians and Grenadians seeking refuge cluster in the valley and on the mahogany ridge behind this village.
This place of No Worries the last chunk of a Creole estate wrested and arrested by descendants of one of Bolivar’s generals in the south. The familal feud still simmering in the heat thrown in faces by the new road, covering old bloodline tracks.
The sea sings all weekend while strangers paint in the percussion of the waves. At the old house, where zombies wait on barbecue and a lost tribe of silent white Rasta Creole hippies glides through rooms speechless, Denis the cat plays badjohn and Souci the small sausage dog with oversize feet is the only one to charm his claws…
Lagniappe (a little extra freeness)
Among the unfolding of new Creole tales, the discovery that Eddie has Venezuelan antecedents (is this something I read in 100 Years of Solitude, or the General in his Labyrinth?). His great great was a general in the south…Chong the Chinee healer, reincarnated in the body of Uncle M, notorious buller of the Croisée, who resurfaced as a drug runner from Brazil. Shaman of the Caracas favelas, who sent for vestments and drum to go to the place where no one could see him again. Famous for extracting bullets and healing bandits. Una vez braced by would-be assailants, he assured them: “Before morning you’ll be dead.”… When Ah dead bury me clothes…
….The Reconquest of Mundo Nuevo rumba una
I had been plotting it for years. Nothing less than the reclamation of those lands which have never belonged to me and would never belong to anybody. They stretch from Key West in the north down to Cayenne in the south.
We were a coscomel brigade.The commandantes handpicked by me for their combination of utter wutlessness and to each, his own unique talent. There was coxman Suarez, lascivious cineaste and polyaddict, with the long flowing locks of a warrior of Shiva; his weapon of choice – a handheld camcorder, his copious cargo pants pockets stuffed with incendiary aphrodisiacs and purloined lighters. Don von John, celestial draughtsman, descendant of a Bolivarian general; third generation Creole landed grandee, dangerous for his metaphysical drawings which once stepped into could lead you to no return; a gent of the old school and much despised – as we all are. To you I dedicate this old Afro-Cuban call and wait for sharkless response:
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yimboro, yimboro yimboro
yimboro, yimboro yimboro
me gusta muchachos la rumba
me gusta muchachos la conga
bailar al compas del tambor
tocados por manos
de negros cubanos
que hayan jurado tocar su tambor
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yimboro, yimboro yimboro
yimboro, yimboro yimboro
en cuba se corta la cana
en cuba se toma el café
en cuba se baila bembé
se fuma Tabaco
se toma guarapo
detras de la comparsa
se va echando un pie
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yiri yiri bon yiri yiri bon
yimboro yimboro yimboroo
There was Kommisar Vlad, of the Odessa Division, sometimes known as the impaler, who breakfasted on white Neissen rum, fought with a mind sharpened by Gestapo torturers and the motifs of Thelonius Monk. We had our own sumo – Bramram a brahminical swordsman; fiddler Stan of the missing teeth; Bolitoli, the offspinner; TonTon Chong shaman and drug runner; Boobalupina and she fren Miss Matadora, along with she sistas Wajabanca Jametina and Saraswateepoonwassywassy…
… Historically we know that the Irish have been in the Caribbean at least from the days of the English Civil War, when Cromwell deported many Irish prisoners of war to Barbados. The Roman Catholic heritage Eddie was born to and educated in (but subsequently left behind) suggests what the genealogy of the Carey or Ó Ciardha family of Ireland confirms, largely Catholic and therefore no friends of the English. Whether the Careys made their fortune in the Caribbean as sea dogs or early slave owners, by the early 20th century they were members of Trinidad’s ‘French Creole’ elite. This term is just as confusing and fantastical as Trinidad itself, designating privileged white and mixed members of late nineteenth and early twentieth century society, usually of European extraction –whether French, English, Scottish, German or Corsican, although the Portuguese, who arrived in the nineteenth century as indentured labourers and became shopkeepers and small scale entrepreneurs, were excluded.
His paternal grandmother Marie Alcina Carey, like other members of the Creole aristocracy was sent to finishing school in Paris. Her family home was on the site of the present Hall of Justice. Her marriage to the English civil engineer William Bowen (at a time when the English were consolidating their position as colonial masters) confirmed her status. But besides her pedigree, Marie Alcina was also a painter (who never exhibited) and Eddie speculates that it was her influence (intricacy and skill, “the petticoats were her”) which contributed to the unique tropical design of the famous ‘Gingerbread House’, family home of the Boissière family on the Queen’s Park Savannah which her prosaic husband built (”He had a very dry interpretation of how a house was built” says Eddie, to whose eye the Gingerbread House has a male structure, with a female skin and a “Caribbean sense of order”).
Eddie recalls being driven round the Savannah as a small boy, and the family pointing out the Gingerbread House; there was a sense of pride knowing his grandparents’ role in its construction. “It’s always been an inspiration…I thought –yea how can I top this?” With an engineer, lawmaker and doctor among his immediate antecedents, he’s aware “I have something to live up to. They did things, I’m proud of them.” While some still misconceive Eddie as an anachronistic hippy, a dreamer not a doer, any serious review of his art practice’s prolific output, never mind his building, gardening and cooking, totally contradicts this perception. “To work has never been a problem.”
Before embarking on his efforts to emulate his antecedents’ achievements, Eddie went into ‘educational exile’ in England aged seven. He attended Roman Catholic preparatory (Barrow Hill, Godalming, Surrey) and secondary (St George’s College, Weybridge) schools, which shaped his artistic and spiritual outlook rather than his inherited Catholicism. From this period he remembers “a defining moment” when he was eight and borrowed Eric Von Danniken’s Chariot of the Gods from a Commer van travelling library. With a dustcover of an Aztec face he thought it “the most interesting of books…I read it through and thought this speculation is quite worthy… It exposed me to evidence of ancient civilization…the Maths, the logic of it. My fascination is with the Maths, the structure. The stones were constructed with a combination of energies, another kind of logic. These societies lived within the symbol.”
Another early defining memory was his first day at St George’s, meeting the art maser Fergus Bernard-Smith. “He gave us all a piece of paper and told us to draw something. I looked out the window and saw two pigeons eating. That’s it! I drew the pigeons. ‘That’s brilliant’ (was Bernard-Smith’s assessment).” The art master’s influence over the next six years is still with him. The school’s new art and music block was at a hundred yard remove from the main school, an oasis if you like of creativity. “Every summer Fergus went to India. He had a wall full of slides of India, temples etc. He was obviously into Hinduism.” This introduction to Hinduism and Yoga was as seminal as his discovery of Chariot of the Gods. “The Yoga experience has had a huge influence. It fitted where Catholicism was supposed to.” His last three years at school were intense. As the future architect of impossible physics, he actually gave up Physics “for more art”. He was “putting frameworks in place”
His eventual D grade in ‘A’ level art did not deter him from enrolling at Croydon College of Design and Technology, which he’d visited casually as it was close to the house his doctor father, the Chief Medical Officer in St George East, Trinidad, had bought when considering relocating. Croydon, in the early post punk, New Wave 1980s combined the radical (always the hallmark of English art schools after the Second World War) with the traditional: “I studied art in the most traditional way. Drawing was always the first place to start, it’s automatic. I was taught this as a method of writing, not something I’d consciously have to study. When I went to England there was an ‘art room’. I knew places like this would be significant but drawing is not bound by the studio, the sanctity of ‘the art place’, and art school helped me to study drawing more intensely.”
The student body at Croydon was as heterogeneous as Trinidadian society: “Africans, merchant seamen, a gypsy woman, a window cleaner’s daughter, a gay bondage guy.” There were weekly leftwing lectures, so text (a frequent feature in The Architect series) became a part of drawing. Art history extended this affinity for text/writing. “When I was studying Leonardo I became fascinated by his images, texts of architecture; a visual text; painting full of writing.” This tendency to view all visual expression as text, certainly accords with postmodern multi-disciplinary, blurring of boundaries Cultural Studies style theory. We can read dance and music as text, along with the natural and built environments, or even a culinary dish, or a hairstyle. Eddie’s textual affinity however, has less to do with received or modish theory and more to do with narrative, stories and processes. But he’s also a writer, as his forays into journalism, his ongoing Rocket Stove chronicles, philosophical musings, trenchant social commentary and Trini ol’ talk on social media all attest.
Significantly, he only began painting in his last year at Croydon. “Colour freaked me out – it’s fucked up. Moving from the single point of a pencil to a brush with 500 points. Paint’s a gooey liquid and colour isn’t static. What you’re painting is changing; you’re changing. You’re looking at one scene but there’s a hundred colours or more. You’re looking at colour building and deconstruction.” The process of composition “becomes simplified”, when drawing, “you have more control” although with limitations: “You have to stay with line, form and field.”
The extended sojourn in England –from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood – is as relevant to his Trinidad art practice as it is to all other aspects of his life. Distance can allow for unobstructed vision, for a clarity which eludes us in the midst of the trees. But in Eddie’s case, his ‘exile’ meant that on his return to Trinidad in 1986 he now had to re-cover, discover his ‘native land’, in a way not possible for someone who has never left, who takes place for granted, as we all do as insiders. Not only did he have to find his place, but also himself. The Architect series is an extended, extensive record of his searches, enquiries, speculations, meditations and findings en route. The fact that it has been developed in tandem with a career as a painter, his role as a father and his time-consuming obligations as landowner/landlord, makes it all the more remarkable.
He left England with no regrets: “I’d had enough up there. It was too predictable, too easy. This isn’t exciting.” His head of department at Croydon told him “Go home and see what you can do.” He willingly accepted the challenge, “I like risk. I didn’t know what would happen in Trinidad. Here was new territory.” Returning he had a bumpy landing and a bad dose of culture shock. After persuading his father to convert the old servants’ quarters of a family property in St Ann’s into a studio, he took up residence there “cranking it out” as he’d done for his final show at art school “to see what the clash of environment and my personality threw up.”
The art scene was disappointing, “Like a small English village…I felt like a cat among pigeons, having come through the Punk Revolution.” The Art Society “was like an English tea party”, moribund since the days of powerhouse Sybil Atteck; Carlisle Chang was “old and miserable” and “No one was painting, they were illustrating.” The ‘pay your dues’ attitude of an older generation of artists apprehensive about the challenge of new bloods and the advice of Boscoe Holder, one of the few internationally established old guard, “Use your whiteness for contacts” only compounded the wall he hit with his painting. “After three months I ran into serious problems-‘the palm tree aesthetic’ which dominated the local art scene was not one he had any intention of subscribing to.
Confronting his frustrations, he returned to drawing – it was cheaper and a foundation he knew: “The underpinning of all traditional arts, especially here.” After his experience with life drawing “something clicked” He bought a 25 foot long roll of paper and laid it out on a piece of ply. “The circus was in town. Very boring but the tent was very interesting.” He told himself “I’m going to do the monkey thing –keep scribbling.
They’re
Selling postcards
Of the hanging
They’re painting
The passports brown
The beauty parlor
Is filled with sailors
The circus is in town (Bob Dylan-Desolation Row)
“I was trying to invent something, I wasn’t sure what or where I was going. By smudging I ended up with impressions, an extended doodle. I used protractors…and found myself describing something. I’ll just do it and think about it when it’s done.” Here is the genesis of Architect and in fact his whole art practice: a refusal to conform to the cultural norms, a faith in risk and discovery and most of all- a commitment to process, the work. As an insider/outsider returning to his place it’s significant that he adopted an intrinsic Trinidadian Creole modus operandi- extempo, where one improvises, due to constraints or simply for the fun of it. “I got into the habit. You don’t need to look for inspiration, you’re in the world. It’s a discipline. This approach was appropriate to here.”
Abandoning any attempt to assimilate with the stifling stagnation of the local art scene, (You don’t bemoan the state of affairs, you’re driven to set up your own institution”) he was accepted the necessity of “ inventing a new landscape” and consequently “established myself in my own space, where I could run the experiment.”
In the process of inventing himself and his practice there were other liberating realizations.
Finally San Souci
In those desultory destitute
Daze of despairation
Denis the cat
Was a good friend to me.
Sir Denis self
Lord of the High Woods
-I pour libation for your spirit-
a feline character deserving
of a pome in Old Possum’s
book of notables
probably deserving of
his own book like crazy Kit’s cat
A picture of graceful equanimity
A true true Creole zen maestro
Who ruled the dogs
With laconic feint of paws.
He would always come
An hour or two
After the Militia’s arrival
Discreet but genial
When ready.
He made his entrance
Unheard unseen
When you looked from
The surf song below
Measuring the crash
He’d be sitting at your feet
Blinking greeting.
One disastrous Christmas
With daughter Rachel
We arrived by night
Similar circumstances to the Nativity
-if you’re fond of drama-
She’d been kicked out
For general wutlessness no doubt.
I bought a piece of frozen turkey
and we headed Sans Souci
Arriving and claiming
A sleeping spot upstairs
I sank to see a bat
In sink
Summoning Sir Denis
I asked him
To kindly remove it
In one swift swallow and gulp
Bat gone
Sir Denis enquired if that would be all
And retired as sleekly discreet
As he’d glided in
Return to Sans Souci (150515)
Volver, bien retourné
Back here
Again
I remember: wave talk roar
Voices passing on the road
And now I’m back
In the roll of the sea
Bouncing rock
Echoed endlessly
Rolling on night’s drums
Hard rocked
Between Toco and Tobago
Rolling the night away
In Sans Souci…
A heartland in this map
Of breeze and breath
I went away unwillingly
And forgot earth’s broad-striped orbit
Which my friend tells me is
Turquoise and olive green
But I see purple and cerulean
The Guest House at Sans Souci (160515)
On the lip of rainforest crest
Above the natural soundbowl
Of sea’s perpetual monologues, murmurs,
secrets, sobs, sighs and sussurations
Open board windows present
Ancient mahogany overgrown
With orchid, starch mango
Breeze stirring kinetic dance
Of palm fronds
Banaquits flit below Ochun’s birds
Death cap magistrate corbeaux gyre
In warm air currents
Here neuroses, tabanca,
The world’s weariness
Are all sloughed off
Washed by the waves
Sometimes soothing
Bruises, broken limbs and lives
Other times storming
Rain hammering galvanise.
Côte du Nord (170515)
Driving this stretch
Bounded by turquoise
Purple banded pounding sea
Surveying
The sweep of earth’s orb
And its energy
The late afternoon sun blazing
Over crest wave Atlantic
Black rocks
Slanted to the storm’s peculiar angle jut
Into
that idyllic sunseascape
Living slate lashed
By every tide’s impositions
Of rock to water
Slicing floodflow
Matting that sheen.
Those dark monoliths
Solid against storm
Impervious to beam or shine
Deflect the spray
Admirably in static stoicism
Some can imitate.
Between the sea and headland
Between this inhalation
And the hopeful next
My life’s lungs shuttle
Or maybe ventilate
That there is bliss
Is indisputable
And so is sorrow
Replied those slant dark rocks
On the stretch into
And out of
Sans Souci
So many times of mirages
On the road
Old dogs by Big Bay bridge
So many mindless times
On the long and winding
Road to Souci
Where I should be
Listening
to Mahogany
groaning
The architectural impossibilities
And the callous concrete
Foot drop stops
To make you lame
I’ve survived them all
But you lost your front teeth
Along with your looks
-A long time ago –
Which is something
meaning nothing
At Sans Souci
So I continue
To watch
Those wave-struck rocks
Returning
Descending
into chaos
After the stark
Suffused with light murti
Created quite simply
for now
An opposing force
200716
Between exile and exclusion
Flight and delusion…
…arrival of the Caribbean sun
in Paris
introduces Impressionism…
…I’m always grateful
to be in Sans Souci
wherever I’ve been
to hear that roar
restores my senses
of movement
soothes and solaces
smoothes and infuses
surging rhythms forward
washes away
regret and failure
pounding always
rolling ruffling
…191216…It’s like returning to a lover, so familiar but always new. My spiritual home in Mundo Nuevo. I continue to explore, always beginning with contemplation of the constant roar and rumble of the ocean. Today it looked frightening, heavy cavalry charging, battering offshore razor black rocks; quarrelling with itself, surf scittering sideways from the frenzied rush. And tonight, if only briefly – the stars: Orion’s belt brilliantly defined immediately overhead
040218
A morning moon perches above the trees. Birds of Ochun wheel across its face, over the high woods, while a threadbare sentinel presides on blasted mahogany branch. Solid block of blue sky above green aquamarine sea, Tobago clearly defined on the horizon. Breeze blowing my breaths.
Packing up Shop Trinidad Guardian August 14, 2014
Idling at Cumana junction the other morning, waiting on Chinee Frank to open up shop, I got the earliest call ever from Miss Frankie Goes to Town. Her news was old: Eddie Bowen (variously known as the Architect of Impossible Physics, the Fatman, John von Gusto, Busha, the Sadhu of Sans Souci) painter, drawer, Fine Arts practitioner, landowner, gentleman farmer, builder, philosophe of the high bush, was shutting down shop and moving from his studio on the corner of Sydenham Avenue, St Ann’s. An era in Trinidada’s (sic) postmodern art was over. Could I get the story? Gyul, I tell she, yuh arksin answers. Do I like curry duck? Can a duck swim? Am I not Heironymous Bosch?
When Chinee Frank finally pulled up the shutters and let the world in at 8.20 am, I purchased my vital supplies jumped in my chariot and headed back along the north coast road, through Toco, Mission, L’anse Noir and down the long stretch of black rocks slicing the surf below rainforested headlands, that leads to Big Bay, Sans Souci and up the hill to the Estate House where Mr Bowen was still snoring.
Now turned 50, Bowen is poised to make personal, professional and property changes, bringing “an extended experiment” which began in the late 1980s to a close, simply because “it’s time to do something else. That corner has exhausted its possibilities and it will keep me in the same space.” He’ll be moving on with a justifiable sense of achievement: “I’m glad. A lot of work was done on that corner…a lot of people contributed to a conversation there…it seemed to attract artists, the informality of the space allowed things to happen which couldn’t happen elsewhere…but it’s done.”
The extended experiment Bowen refers to represents a phase in the development of the Visual and Plastic Arts in Trinidad, which introduced subversive irony, social conscience and commentary, and a distinctly vernacular take on the avant garde, that launched the careers of a new generation of local artists committed to interrogating the complexities and contradictions of post independence society, rather than producing pretty nationalist/exotic postcards.
The Sydenham Avenue Studio and Crossover Designs on Woodford Street were the sites where three enfants terribles, Steve Ouditt, Chris Cozier and Eddie the hippy Bowen launched their assault on T&T’s conservative and largely decorative artscape, circa 1988/9. All three had studied abroad outside of the stifling goldfish bowl, gaining technical expertise and exposure to the discourses and practices of the international art world. Yet all three deliberately returned to Trinidad and the Caribbean to make their careers and to shift local art practice and discourse from the bourgeois comfort zone of the gallery circuit, dominated by representational landscapes or portraits, passive consumer items which perpetuated stereotypes of exotic otherness, the tropical paradise trope of the tourist brochure, to a real engagement, even enragement, with the realities and banalities of a young Caribbean society.
The terrible trio were not popular with the art establishment; they offended many, but they undoubtedly revolutionised the practice of the Fine Arts in T&T. They took to the streets and public spaces, engaging commerce and the media, with an incendiary mix of talent and humour which demonstrated to their students and society at large, that art is a serious and necessary business, not a socialite accessory, but integral to the understanding and development of the country and the region.
Much of the conversation initiated in the Sydenham Avenue Studio and the cultural products it spawned have taken T&T to the world, to prestigious biennales, residencies, one man shows. It’s no exaggeration to say that Trinidad’s postmodern art is better known, understood and appreciated outside T&T but that’s what real artists do, bring their local visions to the world for commentary.
“Living and working in Sydenham Avenue changed my perceptions of being an artist,” Bowen reminisces about those early days, when he returned to Trinidad after studying at Croydon Art School in England, where he’d been schooled from age seven. “Living in England was a breeze, being English was easy but I needed space, colours. So I decided, let’s see if I can be Trini. Let me see what the sun has to offer; let me see what I have to offer.”
As a grandson of English civil engineer William “Gingerbread House” Bowen and Marie Alcina Carey, a member of a long-established white Creole family which owned Chacachacare long before it was a leper colony in addition to the Sans Souci estate and properties in Port-of-Spain, including the 13 acre swathe of land straddling the hillside between St Ann’s and Lady Chancellor, the privileged young artist faced several obstacles. After the “Massa Day Done” rhetoric of “the third brightest man in the world” Trinidad’s first prime minister historian Dr Eric Williams and the affirmative Black Power of the 1970s, being a privileged white Creole in post independence T&T carried a stigma Bowen admits “has taken me a couple of decades” to overcome, or simply relax with.
But before engaging with the young volatile society he needed a studio. At the back of a family property on Sydenham Avenue he found the abandoned old servants’ quarters, jammed with old carnival costumes, snakes, cockroaches and moulding memories. “My family are builders,” he mentions with some pride and the construction genes kicked in—the old ‘shed’ was gutted, a room built in front and Bowen had his working space.
However privileged or white, whatever that really means, Bowen is first and foremost a Creole: “I’m aware of being part of this ecology.” If you’ve ever seen him perspiring like a jumping porpoise in his rambling garden at Sans Souci, you could never doubt Busha Bowen’s navel-string attachment to the land of T&T. He’s got his hands dirty in it as often as he’s raised brush to canvas, or pencil to paper; his commitment to engaging all the elements in the disparate coscomel which constitutes Trinidad, is grounded in the land.
And his commitment to engaging our changing society as an artist is one of the reasons he’s moving on. “My work has to engage more fully. That’s my duty to the work. Society has changed and change is good; change in terms of scale, attitude, configuration. What I do is my contribution to discussion. I’m looking for ways to twist the brush in another direction.”
He has some sense of achievement and a generously empathetic take on conflicted postmodern T&T: “I’m surprised and delighted to be respected. I thought the racial/class stereotypes would have won out. But there was room here. The opportunity for failure here is ridiculously high. You’re here to produce, to give to society, otherwise you become irrelevant.”
His Fine Art practice is not that of a disconnected privileged aesthete but a continuing struggle to create new spaces and possibilities. His bush philosophy combines art and the land in a distinctly Caribbean mode: “My work as a landowner is also about creating possibilities outside of the capitalist box. Thinking outside the box is what the Caribbean is all about. You can’t rely on governments. This society gives you a carte blanche to be crazy!”
The estate at Sans Souci, which Bowen describes as his “decompression zone”, “a car park for soul and psyche” has functioned much like a rural counterpoint to the Sydenham studio—“a space for myself and others.” When he first returned to Sans Souci after England. “It was like coming across a dream.” But the architect of impossible physics is well aware that dreams like visions, need work to manifest. And it’s the work, which has called him to leave the comfort zone of the Studio.
“I’m extremely happy to have secured a sale and I’m looking forward to building a new purpose-built studio (a short schlepp up the hill from the old one). I’d like to continue teaching privately,” he muses from the gallery at Sans Souci, the coastline stretching below us with all the possibilities of the future.
I let the pencil draw
We’re back in Sans Souci in April 2019 maybe three years after I began this essay. In the interim I’ve managed to lose the book of copious notes and detailed observations of the drawings I had made in my persona as ‘The Inspector’. Nothing to be done over what’s gone, but continue the conversation.
Eddie picks up a retrospective strand plucked from a coasting wave below in Big Bay and à propos the process of Architect muses: “It’s a distillation of things I can think about but maybe not do, manifest.”
Thinking about the designated drawing room in his recently constructed house in St Ann’s (itself another major manifestation of Architect we might come back to) he focuses on discipline: “When I go in there everything I’m doing goes quiet…the action of drawing, the discipline, allows some stories to emerge along with some of my preoccupations (like Egyptian pyramids). I think it’s part of the Trinidad landscape, or I’m making it up! It’s definitely a source, along with the internet…I’m weaving it all together…I don’t even try. I go in, sit around, turn on lights, heat up the paper, have a cup of tea, turn on the stereo. I like Heavy Metal; I like melody, or it’s raining outside and I don’t need the music. I don’t need to be inspired, I lock into it.”
“The pages have inherent problems to be solved, like a private language, which you can see, feel with your eyes. When I’m painting these days I feel like I’m doing a section from one of the drawings, which are very dense. The later drawings are full of multiple landscapes. It’s very enjoyable when I’m doing it. (I’m tempted) to make it more complicated. There’s an internal critic egging me on ‘Do some more, you eh reach yet..dat eh thick enough.’”
“You want to finish the work but it’s not supposed to be forced for art and entertainment or exhibition purposes. It’s vocational…(I should) make it into a trust to make it more special. It’s a high point in my life, bulling, eating etc has none of that. It’s not an intellectual high. (The drawings) might fit into the Visionary Art category but engineers can get off on it. It doesn’t belong to any one audience.”
Momentarily pausing his monologue he surveys the seascape beyond the straggling lawn: “I’ve been looking at this for 20 years but I remember what was here, that’s layering, intersectionality” -both techniques employed extensively in Architect.”
“We’re illusion makers. That’s the magic of art. It’s not art therapy. I’m creating confusion for its own sake…You could lose your sense of sound, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, silence might be good. I’m aware that a drawing can SHOUT at you, can alter someone’s perception.”
“I let the pencil draw, it’s visceral, as in Klee’s ‘Take the line for a walk’. Except I don’t stop, it’s like going on a journey…Also I feel I can share it, I’m confident about talking about it, taking it out, selling it…People know there’s some mindfulness, something to look at. My job is to get you to look really hard, be teased, interested. I’m giving them what they want. You can give ‘the palm tree syndrome’ but they want more. So I have a kind of optimism and (a sense of) responsibility. The work has a function – to excite, stimulate.”
“Whenever my ego intrudes, the drawings go wrong –doh study de fruit, the process counts…I’m mapping my Creole world, making it up as I go along. I’m writing chapters, although I’m never sure where it ends, what is the story. Rather than dissecting the society I embraced it. I want to embrace as much as I can and the drawing allows me to shape chaos.”
Talk shifts to another major ongoing drawing project, now more than 25 years in the making. The iconic Jumbie Killer, who owes his genesis to an early period of meditation and study with a mentor and spiritual guide Eddie refers to simply as Yogi Man. “I was reading the (Bhagavad) Gita and I had a transcendental question for Yogi Man. Shortly afterwards the drawings went from illustrative to complicated, once I’d been exposed to the Gita’s discussions about Man and God and Arjuna on the battlefield.”
Reading the Gita in the kitchen at Sans Souci he drew the first figure of the Jumbie Killer, who might be twin or certainly brother to the Architect – the thinker. The Jumbie Killer is the man of action “The righteous warrior, who is not righteous.” Eddie theorizes that for the Jumbie Killer “Killing is always an option. It’s neither glorious nor righteous, just what you had to do. Like Arjuna he doesn’t care –he can take out 10,000 men. And yet it’s a noble fight between equals described as family-in war as in blood.”
“The drawings of the Jumbie Killer are intrinsically linked to The Architect of Impossible Physics. They are part of a triad relationship. I execute drawings and paintings but it’s all about those two. Jumbie Killer in one sense represents the killing of sentimentality and false notions.”
Post Scriptum
It’s highly likely that this my Shandyesque run stop start commentary on The Architect of Impossible Physics will stutter stumble onwards. Thirty years of following a path of many crossroads across land, sea, people, animal and vegetable scapes don’t end so.
And after surviving his own recent near demise The Architect himself shows every sign of more new phoenix lives, as his prolific work edges and bursts forward. The momentum organically embracing all fields of endeavor: drawing, painting, gardening, cooking, chopping wood and drawing water, always building, building. Because he’s a modest chap when he ready I’m obliged to declare on his behalf that Eddie has indeed done his namesake grandfather proud.
Casa Bowen mostly hidden from view in the bush of the St Ann’s hills is as unique a one-off construction as granpappy’s Gingerbread House on the Queen’s Park Savannah. Eddie runs with a theme of practical ornamentation we observe in Boissière House, which may be genetically encoded. Yet he has brought all the techniques I’ve noted in this essay to erecting this magically real tropical gothic postmodern house, studio, refuge, shrine, extended kitchen, garden,workshop. Steep galvanise steeple eaves soar into the trees canopy and the covering skies. The inner gloom is somewhat monastic, recalling San Souci Spartan styling, but pierced by chandelier glimmer. Antique hat stand and ancient gas oven juxtapose with digital paraphernalia, dogs wander inner and outer boundaries announcing the passing of agouti, crapaud and stranger with febrile barks.
I intend to be there soon, sipping tea and continuing this conversation.
The reality of colonized peoples often encompassed conditions in which the dichotomies between the real and irrational, physical and metaphysical, real and surreal, were non-existent or at least blurred
Physics and poetry both try to describe the unseen