By Carl E. Hazlewood
For many years, Victor Davson has been seeking a way through complexity to the visual heart of culture. This has meant finding the truth of personal experience, which for him is an aesthetic truth as well as the unavoidable truth of history. This is a difficult, rather elusive location to inhabit in creative terms, as the question becomes how to communicate such formal truth without being ensnarled by didacticisms, visual and otherwise.
Part of the answer lies in Davson’s life as a young man in what was then British Guiana. Growing up there in the 60s was an intense experience: it was a turbulent world bounded all around by the political exigency of colonialism and an ongoing struggle to forge a unifying national identity. But practically from childhood, the artist was aware that the poetical rather than political route was a natural and productive means for him to find a personal expression. He intuitively understood that art embodied nuanced forms by which he could communicate whatever it was he had to say. Davson also recognized that his engagement with art in all its cultural manifestations could not be simply theoretical; he had to be involved. In the unstable and politicised Guyana of the time, it became a psychic struggle to find a generative sphere between blood and the tragic beauty that lay all around him.
To be a good writer, poet, musician or painter requires one to keep unobstructed that “open door of consciousness.” For Davson as a young artist, what was also required was a constant intellectual engagement and dialogue with various world traditions, in order to confront his own inherent cultural multiplicity. This heterogeneity of the soul and racial body is an affective condition one takes for granted as part of the complex Caribbean experience. Davson could not ignore that dissonant heartbeat he sensed alive and pulsing underneath the smooth modern rhythm of everyday urban life.
It is at Christmas time that this metaphysical fusion and fracture makes itself most evident: masqueraders erupt into the street and costumed dancers are everywhere, scaring and delighting kids of all ages. Long-legged stilt walkers shake and stomp and stretch far into the sky, as if reaching toward some unknown God, and the sharp-horned ‘bad-cow’ masks invade private yards to dance and demand spare change.
Barely out of his teens and equipped with all the proper middle-class values, even as Davson sought a way through art to participate in the important formal issues of contemporary modernity, the exciting beat of the drums, the strange thin tunes of the pipes and the unruly landscape of the vast Guyana interior were beguiling. The paintings and drawings he produced at that point reflected the lives of people and the quotidian reality of his environment. Bearing titles such as, ‘Old Woman Wid de Weary Eyes’ and ‘Domino Players’, these works demonstrated his need to attend to the local, on the way to discovering something much more universal in a formal and expressive sense.
