Focus on art

Aug 29, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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Ripudaman Persaud Women Stonebreakers (1952), Oil on Canvas, 32"x46" Collection –Mavis Persaud

Retrieving the Past: Rip Persaud

By Bernadette Indira Persaud

The painting entitled Women Stonebreakers (1952) by Ripudaman Persaud (1982-2006) focuses on three sturdy working-class women breaking stones, against a backdrop of a dramatic red sky.
The stones are lined up in a row in the foreground of the painting.
The bent, tightly interlocking figures, depicted in a spare linear technique, convey a sense of oppression and exploitation from which there can be no extrication. The flat reddish-brown earth tones in which they are painted further lock them into the landscape.
The dominating expanse of the sky, painted in apocalyptic red tones, also heightens the atmosphere of burden and oppression. The stones lined up, frontally, speak metaphorically to a hard tropical dystopia; here is ‘no magnificent province’, no pastoral idyllic scene. The women wear hats for protection against the fierce heat of the day.
The artist’s treatment of the feet of the women – reminiscent of Picasso’s cubist stylistic inventions – emphasizes the working-class character of the women. The title echoes The Stonebreakers (1849) painted ‘by the down-to-earth’, Socialist oriented French artist, Gustave Courbet.
In British Guiana of the 50’s the land/landscape is inextricably bound up with the historical wounds of Slavery and Indentureship, issues of exploitation, political control and more specially, the Nationalist struggle against colonialism. Martin Carter’s impassioned poetry (1951) captures the angry, radical spirit of the times:

Oh! Wake and give to me
The flames, the red flames!
See me? I would rip off my clothes
Run shouting through the town
Wake up houses— open windows
I want flames, red flames!

Rip Persaud, as a member of the first “Guianese Art Group”, founded in 1944, though not caught up in the Socialist fervour which fuelled the anti-colonial movement led by the newly formed People’s Progressive Party, was certainly not indifferent to its working class ethos. The thematic content of such paintings as, The Threshers (1951), Women Stonebreakers (1952) and Shrimping (1953) testifies to this political awareness and engagement. These paintings done by an artist at the youthful age of twenty-four/five, demonstrate an uncompromising moral and ideological content.  The simplified, almost abstract treatment of the figures, anticipate the “proletarian” paintings of the late 50’s by the younger Stanley Greaves.
The pioneering “Guianese Art Group” which preceded the “Working People’s Art Class” (1945-56) founded by E.R. Burrowes, was the first association of native-born artists which espoused a distinct nationalist orientation. It was led by the water colourist/magistrate, Guy Sharples (1906-56), son of the architect, John Bradshaw Sharples (1845-1913).
In the more turbulent years of the 50’s, Sharples would be remembered as the man who sentenced Cheddi Jagan to a jail term of six months with hard labour (1954). Rip Persaud’s wife, the former Mavis Rai, who worked in pastel and water colour, was also a member of the Guianese Art Group which included such notables as Marjorie Broodhagen (secretary of the Group from 1951), E.R. Burrowes, Hubert Moshett, Reginald Phang, Lee Baird Bender, David Singh, C.A. Gomes, Albert Vanier, Denis Bourne and Sam Cummings. The Group’s annual exhibition became a national event, presided over by the Governor. Mavis Rai-Persaud (b.1928) recalls that in 1951, Claude Hoyte’s A Bowl of fruits won the first prize, while Rip Persaud’s The Threshers was awarded third prize at the Annual Exhibition.
Despite his innate gifts as an artist and his thorough grasp of Modernist strategies in his art practice, Rip Persaud, like most of the members of the “Guianese Art Group”, did not pursue a full-time career as an artist. In 1960, he left to train as a lawyer in the United Kingdom. In 1975 he and family migrated to the United Kingdom, where he worked with the Law Firm, Beale and Company, until his retirement at the age of sixty-five.
The Waterlilies (1976) painted in oils, soon after his departure to the UK, captures the fresh beauty of the lotus lily— a still ubiquitous feature of the canals and trenches of the Guyana countryside. Despite the visible brush marks in its impastoed surface, this limpid canvas, with its clean painterly colours, conveys the translucence and spontaneity inherent in the masterly use, of watercolour. Soft, muted edges of leaves and petals – a radical departure from the hard edged linearity of Stonebreakers – heighten the sense of movement, depth and atmosphere of the painting. The close, tonal, almost monochromatic harmonies, of the earlier pieces have given way to the use of dissonant complementarities, in this later canvas. Fresh greens, vivid pinks are juxtaposed against a dazzling expanse of tropical blues.  Here is a nostalgic tropical bravura conjured up in the cold subdued light of another climate.
Rip Persaud’s body of work, though small, reveals a substantial repertoire of techniques and stylistic approaches, selectively deployed to accommodate a varied range of subject matter—from the thematic preoccupation of the radical 50’s to the occasional forays into the remembered landscape of home. But subject matter, whether humble, grand, socio-political or dramatic may be of no great consequence, in the final analysis, as Manet succinctly puts it: ‘An artist can say everything with fruit and flowers or simply with clouds’.

Reprinted from THE ARTS JOURNAL Volume 4 Numbers 1 & 2 (March 2008)
The editor of THE ARTS FORUM COLUMN can be reached by E-mail: [email protected] or by telephone: (592) 227 6825)
The Art Editor, Bernadette Persaud, can be reached by E-mail: [email protected] or by telephone: (592) 220 3337.

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