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paint

I grew up at a time and in a country when there was very little to buy in the stores. Few books. Food was scarce. Older people remembered stores selling ‘nice’ clothes while my generation did not.  Perhaps today I tend to remember and talk about these “hard guava times” not because I want pity but because I think this experience of living under a dictatorship shaped me in so many ways. 

When I was a child, there was a store called GNTC – Guyana National Trading Corporation.  It was a bookstore / stationery store and during these times, the shelves were bare and dusty with just a few books which had turned brown in the humidity and heat. But it was my favourite store. When there was a “shipment” (every Guyanese knows what this means) GNTC would morph into a place that sold colourful delights.

As a child, I didn’t care that most of it was imported from China. Yellow pencils and plastic sharpeners, hard pink erasers that shredded your page.  Colouring books, books with ostensibly white pages but which would magically flood with colour when brushed with plain water.  Sometimes they stocked plastic paint sets. A clear plastic lid covering twelve ovals of shiny water-based colours which melted away after just a few uses.  There were books, too.  A few copies of some Enid Blyton’s or a couple from the Morgan The Absent-Minded Mallard series. Mom always bought me books.  But I wanted everything. The cheap yellow pencils but most especially the tray of paints.  Mom reminds me to this day that I would tug on her hand and say, “I never had one of these.”

So began my obsession with art supplies – paints more specifically. 

Fast forward to when I was about fourteen. I was taking art classes from a private tutor – a friend of my mother’s whose life was marked by a tragic love story, who was epileptic, and was also a gifted painter.  Mom paid her to give me art classes on Saturday afternoons.   I suppose this was equivalent to affluent parents paying for their children’s extracurricular classes. But we were not rich.  Far from it. 

My sister was already living in America with her husband. Knowing this, my tutor suggested that mom ask my sister to send me a supply of acrylics so I could begin to understand the feel of painting with soft paints, how each pigment had its own temperament and which colours it played well with.

 She made a list. Cadmium Yellow (medium), Cadmium Red, Sap Green, Vermillion, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine, Titanium White. I sat in my room and imagined what these colours might look like.  Before this, the only names that colours had were the basic blue, red, green, yellow or the fanciful names Crayola gives to their crayons. 

My sister sent the paints.  
They arrived while I was at school. 

I came home and saw a huge plastic shopping bag on the dining room table.  A slick, thick, red and white plastic bag. Pearl Art emblazoned on either side.  Now, you must understand what this meant to me. Things were so scarce  that even plastic shopping bags with names printed on the sides were a treasure, much less the wonders that were within.  

My lovely sister had not only included those paints the teacher had suggested, but others – Emerald Green, Cobalt Blue and Alizarin Crimson. Brushes – some round, others flat and one which resembled a fan – were in the bag. And a large spiral bound pad of thick, textured paper. 

I hurried up to my room clutching the bag to my chest.  Even the smell of the bag was precious.  Taking the tubes of paint one by one from the bag, I laid each one on my bed.  A flame in my belly spread outwards, hot and a little wild.  The tubes of paint filled my eyes.  I saw nothing else. 

It actually hurt me to use them, but I didn’t have the words to explain to my teacher these full and perfect paint tubes were treasures I didn’t want to use. So I used them.  Sparingly, and with such care. They carried me all through high school. 

When I started university, times had changed, but in many ways things were still the same. Commodities were still hard to find.  A woman living on North Road, close to the market, sold paints from her house.  She too laid them out but on a table, not on a bed.  On Saturdays Dad drove me to her house, I’d fly up the rickety outside stairs to the second floor with enough money to buy two or three tubes.  They were expensive so I couldn’t afford to buy more than a few.   

When I go to the art store, I’m still overwhelmed by the sheer volume of colour.  Potential paintings hide in blank canvases . My mind alternately slows down and speeds up. Slippery colour hanging and subtly moving from hue to hue.  Now I buy paints in excess.  Colours I don’t need.  I duplicate of colours I have. There’s even a box of extra tubes I can take out when one is finished.  If I don’t want to go to the art store for a year, it’d still be okay because I have such a surplus.  Now, I know which paint companies offer the most pigmented colours, which paints are extra slippery, which Manganese Blue is the most sublime shade of blue.  

I don’t know that having all this makes my art any better but the excitement I feel when I look at paint is still the same as the day I unpacked my Pearl Art bag. 

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