Title: The Storyteller

Author: Roberta Stoddart:

Publisher :Crapaudfoot, 2007.

Reviewed by Mary Hanna

Roberta Stoddart's superb satires and heartfelt journeys are chronicled in pure imagery interspersed with essay in her new book, The Storyteller. On the gold cover is a stunning reproduction of the doll-child, Antoinette Cosway, called 'Sand Doll' (1996). The title of the book is on the spine where it does not infringe on the image.

Stoddart says: 'Personally, I think writing can spoil the image ... so we put my name on the spine ... this is not false humility, because as you can see, the book is all about me and my work ... we just decided that the image should speak for itself, unencumbered. Artwork should be experienced ...'

In her text, Stoddart speaks of her paintings with the sure grace of an artist who has given a lifetime of thought to her craft. She explains: 'In my paintings I intimately connect my personal world with aspects of our human family's psychological and spiritual condition. Situated between tradition and rupture, my art speaks to a paradox both individual and universal: the soul's longing for transformation and our need for stability and continuity.' (From 'Learning to Glide').

The Storyteller is a small selection of the prolific body of work that Stoddart has produced between 1991 and 2007. Links between her old and new work remain in the artist's approach, but the subject has evolved. Abigail Hadeed, producer and photographer of Stoddart's work, explains that this book introduces new viewers to the artist and her process. The poet, Richard Olver, writes a wonderfully lucid preface to Stoddart's text in which he expands on her expertise as a symbolist.

Olver explains the function of Stoddart's symbols by pointing out the existence of real meaning under the surface of things. Stoddart seeks this masked truth and presents it in her imagery. It is full blown and authentic, a picture of truth that is often hard to interact with easily, for great art is always thought provoking, not decorative.

Imagery

Stoddart's choice of presenting truth is influenced by such masters as Frida Khalo (in 'Portrait of a Little Painter', 1995), where the heart's blood is depicted as entering the painting through the palette. It is a raw, strong image of what the painter endures to bring her heart's truth to the surface in dream symbols and pure imagery. Stoddart is also influenced by, among others, the artists, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Gogh, Lucien Freud - the old as well as the new masters, which makes her work transcend into a timeless zone - and also by the photographers Koudelka and Diane Arbus. In the Caribbean, she continues the tradition of Colin Garland and was influenced by Judy Ann MacMillan, Albert Huie and Carl Abrahams, again, among others. Stoddart's work is profoundly West Indian and her loss to Jamaica is a great one indeed.

She is perhaps one of the truly great Caribbean artists of the 21st century in the estimation of some Jamaican art collectors. Her satires of Jamaican life - like paintings from the series 'The Things We' 'Worship, Party Girl', and 'There's no escape from Disneyland', and the 'Top Dollar' series ('Gunman, D.J., Politician', and 'Dance Hall Higgler',) - explain eloquently the reasons for her leaving the island to relocate in Trinidad in 1999. 'Endangered Species' (1993) reveals an unflattering view of a white uptown Jamaican family, and in 'My Dear Have You Heard?', Mrs. Upper St Andrew confirms that other people's business is her business. This period in the artist's life was clearly not a happy one and her work shows her disenchantment with the Jamaican scene. Stoddart also had difficulties professionally, as her satire 'German Expressionism Well-Installed' (1998) suggests.

Other extraordinary, witty and poignant satires are 'Privy To The Adventures of Nation Building' (1995), which shows the Governor General and Queen Victoria ensconced in a corked bottle, and 'Toasting The Trough' (1995), a searing political satire of all the leading politicians at a pool party. Stoddart says: 'My subjects are rendered directly from common people who are part of my landscape, in frank simplicity, my subjects transcend their own epoch to exist outside of time. Mine is the impossible task of making paint become flesh. I have never thought I could paint or draw well, so the impetus to try harder is always present.'

Her portraits of local celebrities are, nevertheless, perfectly crafted, drawing and completely recognisable.

Imaginative

Stoddart works closely with the experience of being a white creole in Jamaica. Her 'Annie Palmer' series (1993) is imaginative, self-referential, and historical in content. Her 'Sand Doll' dates from this period. Concerning this racial issue, Stoddart says: 'I am claiming my rightful place in a history that would rather I did not, because of the past. Over the years, I have discovered that my identity is much more expansive and inclusive than what I was taught it was.'

The artist was born in 1963. She explains that throughout her childhood and adolescence 'it was clear that reality was the cornerstone to be avoided at all costs. Investigating nothing, ashamed of everything, we were never to remember. I forgot myself in the crushing collision of several traumatic histories, in which perpetrators and victims regularly switched roles' (From 'Divine Bride'). Stoddart's struggle with identity and belonging has been worked out in the gorgeous and disturbing work that fills the final sequences of her book. She paints the 'Divine Bride' (2006) who longs for union with her beloved. She is embracing her true identity, reclaiming and accepting all of who she is. Like Michelle Cliff, she yearns to work from completeness. 'Creativity is a form of restitution,' she says, 'self-love is re-birthed from within.' Thus, Stoddart sees her art as 'the stepping-stone to my true vocation: connecting to love. Ultimately, God may be what 'I Do', as well as what I 'believe''.

Stoddart is led from the examination of the ethnic self and its challenges to a deep desire to understand differences. In Trinidad, she undertakes to recreate the albino community in full blown and powerful images of the grotesque. She says: 'Negative notions regarding difference create conflict and promote isolation and loneliness. The feeling of not belonging is civilisation's greatest contemporary illness. Our planet grows and evolves through its profound diversity, yet we collectively fail to value each and every human being and living creature.' (From 'In The Flesh')

Levelling device

The result of this situation is the undermining of human spirituality and potential. Stoddart is committed to unravelling this conundrum and her, painterly images grab the eye and mind with painful realism even as they tell their story in symbolic images. She works with the albino community and ultimately draws on the writing of white West Indian creole women to create a series called 'Creole Cockroaches' (2006).

Here, the artist has created roaches with the faces of each ethnic community, a great levelling device and one that speaks of the search for belonging and home. Stoddart is a great painter and thinker, a careful and all-embracing writer, and a seeker who has grounded herself in her Jamaican-ness. Her signature iconography (sea eggs, shells, butterflies and skeletons) form part of the symbolic repertoire that consistently appears in her work. Recurring themes are the sky and the elements, day and night, light and dark; brides and misfits; mongrel dogs and other animals; churches and graveyards; and the ocean and maritime vessels. Her recent work forefronts portraits of the grotesque and the different. Stoddard's The Storyteller is a brilliant and thought-provoking book of unforgettable images.

This is a highly sophisticated artist committed to exposing the hypocrisy, the class struggle, the religious beliefs and non-beliefs of the beautiful Caribbean. Her paintings appear to be born from the developed world, but relate to subjects from the developing world. She is a rebel with a cause, not only capable of painting a pretty picture, but also of illustrating the unspeakable.

Abigail Hadeed is a photographer whose collaboration with Stoddart includes Stoddart's first book Seamless Spaces (2000) and her own book Trees Without Roots - The Caribbean & Central America (2006). She produced Stoddart's fifth solo exhibition In The Flesh (2007) and her new book Roberta Stoddart - The Storyteller.