Brushes With Dream Worlds

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Two years ago in Santo Domingo’s Museum of Modern Art, I was enjoying some beautiful oil paintings by Dominican artist Alberto Ulloa, when I was surprised to discover that they were for sale. Pay $1,000 and you could walk out of the museum with any one you wanted.

A year later, I was even more surprised to learn that Ulloa’s paintings were selling in a swank Amsterdam gallery for up to $20,000.

My experience illustrates what I have since learned through research. The Caribbean region is rich in hidden treasure: not pirate’s gold, but art. Comparatively still affordable, Caribbean art can be a beautiful bargain for the island visitor.

It also can be hard to find. To see the best work, it’s sometimes necessary to visit the artists personally, haunt museums and seek out galleries not on the tourist beat. I learned these tricks because I’m in love with Caribbean art and spent several years researching a book on the subject.

My love began in Santo Domingo, late one afternoon about two years ago, as I was walking back to my hotel through El Conde, a cobblestone mall in the old section.

I turned a corner, found myself in a quiet little plaza and spotted a wrought iron sign for Galerie Plaza Toledo. I entered and came upon a glory of art. In a two-story stone house dating back to 1503, colorful paintings were stacked floor to rafters: intense, personal visions in a multitude of styles.

The owner of the gallery, Bettye Marshall, is a Texas transplant who fell in love with Dominican art 20 years ago and stayed. The paintings in her gallery have the color and originality of Haitian paintings but reveal a more sophisticated European technique. They are a testament to the influence of the dozens of Spanish artists who fled Franco’s regime in the ‘30s and introduced European painting techniques to the native Dominicans. The surprising sophistication and radiant tropical beauty of this island’s art caught my heart. For $200, I bought an oil painting of enormous birds readied for flight over a tiny New World city.

I visited Marshall’s gallery again and again, and discovered other galleries, and in La Atarazana, Santo Domingo’s colonial mooring docks, I found the Galeria De Arte Nader and the Galeria Arawak. Later, near the town of La Romana, about 120 miles east of Santo Domingo, I found Altos de Chavon, an artist’s settlement that is an uncanny reconstruction of a late 14th century Italian village whose narrow cobblestone streets are crowded with galleries.

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In Dominican painting, the ordinary joins hands with the magical. At Casa de Bastidas in Santo Domingo, I saw a young boy gazing at a butterfly trapped inside a bubble; the Madonna and child as Byzantine wooden dolls; a peasant girl whose head sprouts a pot of flowers. But the work of two artists in particular haunted me, Dionisio Blanco and Candido Bido. Both express the simple rural world beyond Santo Domingo, honoring the majority of Dominicans who till the land.

Blanco is an art teacher, a critic and an artist. He is obsessed with the image of the sower who works the soil and is worked by it. He depicts the sower as icon, made symbolic by a hat-covered face.

Like Blanco, Candido Bido has received international acclaim and, like Blanco, his paintings sell for from $500 to $5,000. I first saw Bido’s paintings in the Museum of Modern Art, then later at the Galeria De Arte Nader. It was love at first sight. Bido comes from the rural village of Bonao, 65 miles north of Santo Domingo, and it is the region’s tobacco and banana workers who he depicts. In the Nader Gallery, where many of his paintings hang, he told me, “I can see them--feel them around me.” Bido portrays his subjects with a tender and anecdotal humility, preserving an essential charm of innocent men and women, almost biblical in character, in a bright, blooming world.

My awakening to Dominican art made me curious about the art from other Caribbean islands. I wanted to see it and I wanted to know if there is something that connects all Caribbean art. From the Bahamas--not technically in the Caribbean--to Trinidad off the coast of South America, we call it the Caribbean region. But what gives affinity to puzzle-piece scraps of land colonized by the Spanish, Dutch, English and French?

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The obvious answer is history, a shared legacy of slavery, colonialism, Christianity and the struggle for independence--all pervasive themes in Caribbean art. Yet I was to find that beyond historical influences, something else connects. Something beyond both subject and style. That something is the enchanted way of looking at the world, and it’s the something that I love: the poem in the painting. It’s what Cuban poet Alejo Carpentier called magic realism: a dreamlike way of seeing that transcends everyday reality.

From the Dominican Republic, I traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico. On narrow Cristo Street inside the stone ramparts of Old San Juan, I found an exhibit of the paintings of Jorge Zeno at the Galeria Botello. Zeno’s visions are expressed in silk-screens selling for $300 and oil paintings from $3,000. His art is pure magic realism, slipping the viewer into that confused, morning state between sleep and waking. In one of my favorite Zeno paintings, “The Birth of the Moon,” a young woman sails upon black water in a pink boat, small as a slipper and pulled by a flying bird. White-gowned and ghostly, she glides under a crescent moon, resting on the sleeping head of a giant man, while benign occult figures frolic in an eerie night-scape.

“I love your paintings,” I gushed to the young artist.

“All women love my paintings,” he laughed. “Really they are crazy about me!”

“What do your paintings mean?”

“They’re all inexplicable dreams. I can’t explain them.”

“Try.”

He thinks for a moment, then says waggishly “They’re voyages through the music of color.”

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In my search for a pan-Caribbean aesthetic, I found that often private visions are explored through the mythology of the extinct aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean. In recent years, this mythology has become a unifying touchstone of regional identity. Images of stone fetishes, pottery remains and petroglyphs have captured the imaginations of numerous island artists. On St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I visited Roy Lawaetz in his studio, a huge stone carriage house on an 18th century sugar plantation. Here he sells his large and often unusually shaped canvases that start at $4,000.

A native of St. Croix, Lawaetz studied art at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. He paints fanciful fish, mermaids and whiskered sea creatures that cavort in a topsy-turvy ocean, bright and fabulous. Lawaetz is so devoted to conveying the Caribbean, he even mixes the dark sand of St. Croix right into his paint. His paintings are rich with the triangular forms of Arawak Indian symbolism.

So much of Caribbean art is psychological fantasy--the stuff dreams are made of. And like dreams, it contains elements of astonishing honesty, affirming Picasso’s claim that “art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” In Caribbean art, psychological truth triumphs over the mere impression of external fact.

The pictures of Bahamian Amos Ferguson shine with the ordinary house paint he uses to portray his own deep Baptist faith, animal symbolism and private myth. I had first discovered Amos Ferguson’s work through the illustrations he did for the children’s book, “Under the Sunday Tree” (Harper & Row, 1988). Before traveling to Nassau, I called Ferguson to ask whether I could interview him. His wife, Bea, answered and welcomed me, “You come this side by the grace of God; your feet will be guided.” In Nassau, I visited PAINT, the astonishing permanent collection of Ferguson’s paintings in the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation, then I made my way to his simple wood house on Nassau Street.

I sipped ginger beer with Amos and Bea Ferguson and sitting in their tiny front room surrounded by his paintings was like sitting in a garden. For $400, I bought a small whimsical oil painting of a dressed-up Bahamian businesswoman impossibly balancing three children in her arms. When I was observed studying another small painting called “Big Mouth Woman,” Amos threw it in as a gift. Ferguson’s exuberant scenes invited me to go fishing, turtle hunting and picnicking on the beach; to become witness to a world in which not only color, but life itself is joyously intensified. “My husband studies the world like he’s studying the Bible,” Bea told me. But Amos preferred to put it this way: “God creates beautiness; I just paint it.”

Indeed religion, whether Arawak symbology, Christianity, Voodoo or Rastafarianism, strongly influences Caribbean art. Today in the Bahamas, the West African spiritual festival, Junkanoo (Jan. 1 and Dec. 26), with its flamboyant costumes, feverish energy and wild abandonment, has recently inspired the new Junkanoo painting.

In Nassau, I wandered down Prince George Wharf to the Junkanoo Museum. There, in an old customs warehouse, I marveled at the spectacular floats made for the festival, noting that the two primary float designers, Stan and Jackson Burnside, are also the originators of Junkanoo painting. Today, master Bahamian artists such as Antonious Roberts create passionate paintings that convey the restless rhythm and freedom of Junkanoo. Their work can be seen in the Marlborough Antiques Gallery and the Caripelago Gallery, both in Nassau.

Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba have most established art communities, yet marvelous work is being created on even the tiniest islands.

On the island of Grand Cayman, Teresa Grimes, who once studied art restoration in Italy, spent months studying one row of palm trees. “I was struggling to capture the constant movement of the palm fronds and play of light bouncing all around from the sea,” Teresa explained. The result is “East End Roadside,” a vibrant oil painting that now hangs in the governor’s mansion in George Town and captures not only the illusive colors of palm fronds blown by the wind, but the wind-blown motion itself. Grimes is an executive of the Cayman Islands Visual Art Society, and her paintings ($900 to $2,400) are representative of the imaginative work being created on the small islands, from the Bahamas down to Trinidad.

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GUIDEBOOK: Caribbean Artfulness

Where to see and buy art: Altos de Chavon, the artist’s colony, is three miles east of Casa de Campo resort in La Romana, Dominican Republic. It can be reached by car or by the free shuttle buses from the resort; Casa de Campo telephone (809) 523-3333.

Caripelago Gallery, Bay Street, Nassau, Bahamas; tel. (242) 326-3568.

Casa de Bastidas, at the corner of Calle Las Damas and El Conde, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 688-7601.

Galeria Arawak, 104 Pasteur, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 685-1661.

Galeria Botello, 208 Cristo St. in old San Juan, Puerto Rico, sells the work of artist, Jorge Zeno; tel. (809) 723-9987.

Galeria Candido Bido, 5 Dr. Biez St., Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 685-5310.

Galeria De Arte Nader, 22 Rafael Augusto Sanchez, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 544-0878.

Galeria Plaza Toledo, 163 Isabel La Catolica 163 Esq. Luperon, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 688-7649.

Junkanoo Museum, Prince George Wharf, Nassau, Bahamas; tel. (809) 356-2731.

Kennedy Gallery, West Shore Center, 7 Mile Beach, Grand Cayman Island, Cayman Islands; tel. (345) 949-8077.

Marlborough Antiques Gallery, Marlborough Street, Nassau, Bahamas, tel. (242) 328-0502.

Museum of Modern Art (Museo de Arte Moderno), Plaza de la Cultura, off Avenida Pedro Henriquez Urena, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; tel. (809) 685-2153.

Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation at Vendue House on Bay Street, (near George Street) Nassau, Bahamas, to see Amos Ferguson’s art; tel. (242) 326-2566. To purchase art, contact Ferguson, tel. (809) 326-0776.

Roy Lawaetz Studio, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; call first, tel. (809) 773-1042.