Alison Chapman Andrews Remembered

By Allison Thompson and Alissandra Cummins

The ancient watercourses of my island

Echo of river, trickle, worn stone,

The sunken voice of glitter inching its pattern to the sea,

Memory of foam, fossil, erased beaches high above the eaten boulders of st philip

My mother is a pool

Kamau Brathwaite’s Mother Poem, is dedicated, he writes in the preface, to “my mother, Barbados: most English of West Indian islands, but at the same time nearest, as the slaves fly, to Africa.” Barbados’ most important poet puts into words the spirit of his country, capturing that profound emotional relationship to a tiny 166 square mile island which is home. “These fields and hills beyond recall are now our very own”: lines from Barbados’ national anthem express for a newly post-colonial Caribbean island the need to take possession not only of the land but its stories, its memories and its representation. The older expression “my navel string is buried here” perhaps better conveys the close physical, emotional and ancestral associations that are invested in the earth.

What others have expressed in words, Alison Chapman Andrews captured in paint. She fashioned a visual language that articulated for a nation its most profound sense of selfhood. Chapman-Andrews worked with a singular and independent focus for the development of the visual arts in Barbados for more than forty years. She was renowned as an influential art teacher, an insightful art critic, an passionate advocate for cultural projects, and a keen collector. But her name is synonymous with landscape painting and it is here that her impact has been greatest. Her strongly patterned interpretations of the Barbadian landscape are amongst the most profound investigations of the environment and our relationship to it.

Arriving in Barbados from England in 1971, during the first decade of political independence, Alison began to paint the physical features of the island, particularly the countryside. She is now acknowledged as one of the first artists during the post-colonial era to investigate the Barbadian landscape, and to translate it in a way that revealed its historical and spiritual significance. Much of the landscape was transformed through the colonial process including extensive deforestation, the oppressive cultivation of sugar cane, and the importation of foreign plants such as the royal palms – markers of the pervasive sweep of colonialism; however, with the advent of political independence it was ownership of the land that stood as the source of pride.

While her landscapes are familiar and identifiable, they are also transformed, edited, articulated, as part of a process of mining them for some kind of essence. She reshaped for Barbadians a vision of their environment into something which conveyed a sense of identity and pride and ownership, and inspired generations of younger artists in their own interpretation of it. Alison was equally generous in acknowledging the influence of others around her, and through this process, a national aesthetic emerged redefining the landscape as a synonym for cultural identity.

In a 1988 review of Chapman-Andrews’ work, art critic Nick Whittle urged the viewer to “return to Blackman’s Gully or Tent Bay and to look at them again as though we had never seen them before; to…perceive all that we have not seen in the past; to experience nature as a part of her, rather than simply as an observer, and then to return again to the paintings and embark on a dialogue with the picture that becomes a voyage of discovery.”

Writers have often pointed to Alison’s representations of gullies, those rare oases of indigenous vegetation. Trinidadian artist Ken Crichlow noted that Alison spent much time painting the Barbadian gully, “bad lands that are unsuitable for cane cultivation….the only survivor of the past sugarcane plantation development which overwhelms views of Barbados.” Whittle described these as “a clarion call for those remaining patches of the Barbadian quilt, which have escaped the rape of sugar, to be preserved or simply left alone.”

A 1997 solo exhibition entitled “Sugar Hill Gully” presented a body of large paintings inspired by this singular location. The works were not so much records of the land, but rather investigations of her relationship to it. In a review, Allison Thompson wrote: “…the viewer is engulfed by Alison Chapman-Andrews’ mature vision of the Barbadian landscape. Surrounded on all sides by large canvases of verdant majesty, we are transported into the heart of a St. Joseph gully. Here familiar vegetation metamorphoses under animistic powers, and nature spirits call to us in a language we forgot we knew.”

The impact of her work on the wider Barbadian society was evident when in 1994 she was honoured by the Barbados Assembly of Women and the Environment for “her contribution to the sustainable development of small island states by heightening our awareness of the environment.” In her response she stated, “When starting to exhibit work in Barbados, two decades ago, I was asked ‘why paint the countryside? Everyone knows what cane is like’. This is not true, we don’t really “see” our surroundings. We are virtually blind both to its faults and its beauty. One of the best things about drawing in the country was driving home, eyes opened by the concentration Everything looked different, wonderful, interesting.”

Chapman-Andrews represented Barbados at a number of regional and international exhibitions including the Santo Domingo Biennial where she was part of the gold medal winning national submission in 1996. She continued to paint despite the debilitating effects of Multiple Sclerosis. The later work became more expressionistic and abstract – a whole new phase that brought her renewed recognition.

Less well known has been her extensive work to promote the development of art in Barbados. She worked as an art teacher at the St. Michael School for seventeen years. She was a founding member and first vice-president of the Art Collection Foundation established in 1986 with the aim of building a national art collection. For seven years she authored the only regular arts column “Galerie”, in the Nation Newspaper from 1989 until 1996.

Throughout her career, despite her modest income, Alison purchased work by other artists on a regular basis. Her private collection of more than 130 works by 65 artists has been bequeathed to the Barbados National Art Gallery. By advocating for public support and action, Alison was a singular voice speaking out for the unheralded artists in Barbados, refusing to be silenced, defiant and undeterred.

As an artist, teacher, writer, art critic, public advocate, and collector, hers was a life devoted to art. Not just the production of art, not just her own career – but above all else building an infrastructure in which a slowly developing artistic culture could somehow sustain itself; advocating for public support, gallery space, government action and by personally participating in and encouraging every initiative, every exhibition in a community too often infected by opposing initiatives and turf wars.

Chapman-Andrews reformulated the familiar icons of our landscape into a visual language which emancipates the land from the mental servitude of slavery, encapsulates its true beauty and illuminates its noble spirit. She journeyed into the Barbadian heartland and honed a vocabulary which embodies its living, breathing life force and articulates for us the ancient kinship to our environment we somehow forgot we had. But standing before her interpretations, we see again.

*This text is based on our 2011 joint nomination of Alison Chapman Andrews for the Prince Claus Award.