HASSAN ALI
At first glance, it can be tempting to dismiss Embah’s paintings as some primary schoolchild’s art project.
This temptation isn’t completely misguided. There is a childlikeness and a sense of play in all of Embah’s work. In Anna Walcott Hardy’s interview with Embah, featured in the catalogue for the 2015 Bat Show at the Frame Shop, the artist notes he has been labelled as “primitive” or “intuitive.”
Artist Dean Arlen has also made mention of Embah’s primitivism – specifically in a blog post memorialising the artist. Ashraph (Richard Ramsaran), curator of the Frame Shop, on the corner of Carlos and Roberts Streets, Woodbrook, says it’s Embah’s dreamy, whimsical take on his subject matter and that same childlike style which made him fall in love with the artist’s work.
[caption id="attachment_1115676" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Unknown (1997). - Photo by Jeff K Mayers[/caption]
While other islands of the region, particularly Haiti, have greeted naivety in their visual arts with admiration, TT has generally been indifferent or turned away from this simplicity. Most often, what holds our attention in the arts is grandeur: Peter Minshall’s mas; Michel Jean Cazabon’s wide and breathy landscapes; Leroy Clarke’s raw intensity.
Embah was born Ancil Waldron in 1938. He worked as a printer at the Government Printery and as a pastry-maker before venturing into art. It’s important to note he was a multidisciplinary autodidact, because this sort of independent, curious spirit is exactly what drove his work.
He died in 2015, leaving behind many loved ones who still speak of him as a presence in their lives and in their thoughts.
Barring Parker Nicholas’s portrait of Embah hanging from the doors of the Frame Shop, the first few paintings in the show are fantastical illustrations of this playfulness. The first piece in the show, Okay Then (2005), greets visitors with a lively scene of sailors and panmen living in the music. This is quite a common scene throughout Embah’s work and sailors are a beloved motif of his – in this show alone, eight out of 39 feature sailors. The piece immediately beneath this, Nice Music (2007), is another sailor painting.
[caption id="attachment_1115675" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Nice Music (2011). - Photo by Jeff K Mayers[/caption]
Walcott Hardy has compared Embah’s figures to Matisse’s and the similarities are visible in this piece. There’s certainly a structural resemblance in the way both Embah’s sailors and Matisse’s dancers are leaning, giving into the music, and the way both groups of dancers are suspended in this ethereal wash of colour, with only vague suggestions of solid ground. But while Matisse chose to represent primitive bodies rapt in a primitive ritual, Embah’s work remains grounded in the contemporary.
Embah was also a musician, and many of these sailor paintings are homages to Carnival and the musical culture surrounding it. In no piece is this clearer than in John’ Good or Bad (1991), in which we see a throng of sailors parading under a gr
