Ronald Cecil Savory comes from a long line of explorers and pioneers in Guyana. His antecedents and current achievements make him the perennial Guyanese and Caribbean man, exploring and evoking his world through his art.
Savory was born in 1933 in British Guiana. After leaving college he worked at several jobs before becoming a civil servant in the crown solicitor’s office. He then transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1959. After serving a few months at the head office, he was posted to Kamarang in the Upper Mazaruni in October of 1959 where, as a Class 2 clerk to the assistant district commissioner, he was expected to be typist, radio operator, weather reporter, weather station record keeper, trade store supervisor, and run the show when the commissioner was off station.
He later resigned from the service and was appointed administrative officer in the British Council. His work in amateur theatre, and activity as an artist earned him a British Overseas Development training stint in television and radio production with the BBC in 1968. He worked at the Guyana Broadcasting Service from its inception as a producer/announcer, until becoming self-employed in 1974.
Savory’s vocation as a painter began shortly before joining the Working People’s Art Class, run by the late E.R. Burrowes, operating in 1957from Smith’s Church School on Hadfield Street. There were several teaching attachments: Guyana School for the Arts, St Margaret’s School and Cyril Potter College of Education. He was coordinator for the 1972 Carifesta Visual Art exhibitions.
Several factors, including two terms of working in the Guyana interior, influenced his interest in indigenous art and the landscape of the hinterland.
Savory was arguably the first in contemporary Guyanese visual art to offer sustained interpretation of the landscape of the interior, to the point where it was acknowledged as his primary source and subject matter.
The artist’s engagement with the landscape and with a wider subject matter, then, including the literature of outstanding Caribbean writers and poets which forms the theme of the current exhibition, reveals the particular and universal instinct of the artist.
He absorbs, comments on and interprets their vision – whether imaginative storytelling or documentary record – of exploration, adventure, discovery, of the social as much as topographical experience of the Caribbean: the exhibition’s listing here including the most celebrated as well as the less well known of our writers and poets, and including, since his first exhibition on this theme in Port-of-Spain in 1982, a wider reference to younger writers such as Augier and Hippolyte of St. Lucia, his adopted home since migration in 1980.
Savory migrated to St Lucia in 1980 with his family and continued to practice creatively. (Photos courtesy of Castellani House)
