Dear Editor,
I was sad and felt diminished as all Guyanese must have felt to learn of Philip Moore’s death. I reproduce below what I wrote about this great Guyanese last year as my tribute to a man whose life-work is and will remain one of our most enduring national possessions.
“Then there is the master spirit who lives in our midst. In October Philip Moore will be a patriarchal 90. His life-work is a glory of his land. I believe he is one of the world’s great artists. His paintings and sculptures should grace famous galleries and perhaps one day they will. For the time being let us feel fortunate that his mysterious, darkly shimmering, meticulously crafted, Afric-centred, shaman-inspired masterworks are available for viewing in Guyana. A day will come when they will be universally revered.
“Once I visited Philip where he lived when he was in Georgetown. The place was filled with his work hung and propped on walls and occupying tables and chairs. He showed me around. I was in a daze. There were many wondrous works in progress. Then in his small bedroom he showed me an extraordinary thing. It was a coverlet of some sort, the material perhaps oil-skin or the stretched and stitched hides of animals. Philip had painted over every inch of both its surfaces in the most brilliant colours in interlocking patterns of suns and moons and stars and crosses and crescents and hearts and priests or prophets in white robes. In the dark it dazzled me. A universcape, he called it.
“Philip said when he felt a weakness in himself, when he felt exhausted by the world, he would lie down and wrap this coverlet around him and rest alone and gradually he would revive, slowly his soul would clear, slowly his vision would come back to him, his dream-clothed spirit would strengthen and at last he would be ready to do his work again.
“‘Wrapped in my cloak of dreams.‘ Naturally I have remembered such a beautiful and wondrous thing ever since. And it has seemed to me that all these exceptional human beings whom we call geniuses, and one of which Philip Moore most certainly is, one way or another, actually or figuratively, clothe themselves with dreams when it is needed to bring forth their miracles of achievement.“
Yours faithfully,
Ian McDonald
