Meeting Denis – a Mind Engaged —— a Tribute to Denis Williams (1923–1998)1

Meeting Denis – A Mind Engaged —— A Tribute to Denis Williams (1923–1998)1 STANLEY GREAVES Y FIRST ‘MEETING’ with Denis Williams took place in the British Guiana Museum of the 1940s – destroyed by fire M in 1945, rebuilt before Independence in 1966, and renamed the Guyana Museum. This ‘meeting’ took the form of looking at a small oil painting of a boy. On Saturday mornings I ran errands to Stabroek market for my mother, Priscilla. The museum was equidistant between my home and the market. A visit to my favourite exhibits before doing the errands provided much pleasure. Of particular interest was the small art gallery, where I enjoyed looking at a few paintings and engravings because of my own efforts in drawing. Assuming he was a schoolboy like myself, my identification with the portrait was total. I visited it every time and often wondered what kind of a person the artist Denis Williams was, a question destined to be answered in full about twenty-eight years later. In the intervening period I did learn something about him. I had be- come a member of the Working People’s Art Class (WPAC), which had been founded by Edward Rupert Burrowes in 1948, the same year in which I joined. It was from Burrowes, “Erb” to most of us privately, that I learnt Williams had been a member of the Guyanese Art Group founded in 1931 under the name of the British Guiana Arts and Crafts Society. He 1 My acknowledgements to Elfrieda Bissember, Director and Curator of the National Collection, Guyana; to Robert Cummings, Head of the Burrowes School of Art in Guyana, for providing dates I did not have; to Anne Walmsley, UK, Caribbean researcher, and to Therese Hadchity of Zemicon Gallery, Barbados. 170 STANLEY GREAVES º had exhibited work and gained a reputation as a figure painter. On the strength of this, in 1946 he was awarded the first British Council scholarship in art offered in British Guiana – often called ‘BG’ in those days. I learnt from the artist and art critic Basil Hinds that Williams, after return- ing in 1949 from studying painting in London at the Camberwell School of Art, decided that his career as an artist would be best served by living and working in London. As the years went by, young artists like myself dreamt of emulating him. Further British Council scholarships were offered, one to Burrowes in 1949 for his outstanding contribution to art in his work with the WPAC. He specialized in block-printing at the College of Art in Brighton. The last scholarship went in 1954 to Donald Locke, a painter who was Burrowes’s assistant in the WPAC. Locke attended the Corsham School of Art and specialized in ceramics – a source of wonder to the rest of us in the WPAC. My next ‘meeting’ with Williams took place in 1956 in the Art Room at Queen’s College, where Burrowes taught Art and Art History. It was also the meeting-place for all the art groups founded by Burrowes – the WPAC, the Friday Group – mainly expatriates who met on Wednesdays, a constant source of amusement to us – and the Young Contemporaries for secondary-school students. This second ‘meeting’ involved another painting, entitled Human World and created in 1949. In 1950, this painting created a sensation in London, being favourably commented on by Wyndham Lewis, an eminent artist of the period. One result was that the painting became the first, and the last to date by an artist from the anglo- phone Caribbean, to appear in TIME magazine. Williams’s painting had been repatriated to Guyana thanks to the efforts of a small group of art lovers that included David Forde, a senior civil servant, and Dr Frank Williams, a physician, both well-respected. On a Sunday morning we were assembled to witness the opening of the crate housing the painting. It was quite a significant moment for us all. I found it to be quite large by local standards. My interest was immediately attrac- ted to the rendering of figures in a specific setting, because of my own stumbling efforts in painting figures in a not well-defined background. Here was a very painterly work, quite unlike my own but with similar concerns about composition. I was intrigued by Williams’s employment of graphic lines and manifest brush strokes, whereas I dealt with tonality and limited textures. It was a learning situation for me and a particularly moving one. I was looking at a work that had been accorded international .

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