Two days ago, Moray House staged another of their arts-oriented evenings with our revered painter Bernadette Persaud. Most adult readers will know that name, but for the younger folks, cocooned as they often are, she came to prominence here in the 1970s with a parade of introspective paintings, fiercely Guyanese, that made her name very quickly here and abroad.
As with all major artists, Bernadette found a particular niche, showing some influence from the world-renowned Monet, but in a distinctive style – her paintings spoke powerfully of nature while clearly conveying the Guyana around her starting with the socialism years and moving through the “troubled times”, as the expression now describes it, that followed. I was not living in Guyana at the time, but I saw her paintings on my Tradewinds visits here, and was immediately caught by them. There is a swath of nature in all her work that conveys Guyana very sharply; time and again it is there in her art, accompanying the wider messages of symbolism and the human spirit that is truly what she’s delving into, and the paintings have won awards and established her reputation internationally; I don’t know how many she has created, but it must be in the hundreds.
