It is important to look at art as a method of writing since the artist evokes emotions, tells a story through his/her work. To write and to paint are in this way synonymous in so far as they mean to capture, to freeze a parcel of human life and imagination by means of codes and signs specific and common to each activity. In his art, Aubrey Williams displays a large panel of devices that adds a spiritual dimension to his works. After a two-year stay in the Warrau tribe of the Guyanese rainforest he understood that the Natives were particularly aware of colour and form, which are, first of all, predominant in all his paintings. Nevertheless, as a second point, one can notice that Aubrey Williams does not hesitate to paint Amerindian figures, that is to say both characters and glyphs, which are a direct reference to The Olmec-Maya civilisation. Finally, the strong influence from the Amerindians links the painter to his reality and shows that he has a great sensibility to nowadays topical issues.  All these techniques of art testify the spirituality that inhabits the artist’s stroke of brush. .

Colour hovers about every aspect of Maya culture because it is the genesis of life. It was originally created by gods Itzamnà, the Lord of the Lizard House, and his wife Ixchel, the Paintbrush Princess. They tightened a line out in the sky to delimit the perfect square of the world that floats on the primordial sea. They compassed each corner and associated a colour to each cardinal point and planted a big yaxche (fromager) in the middle of the square (the World) which they painted blue-green. The yaxche and the colour yax (blue-green) refer to all things of value such as the rain (source of life), essential water, fertility, young shoot of maize, everlasting jade, and the plume of the quetzal (couroucou royal) changing from blue to green. The square representing the World is called the Maya Cosmic Diamond (see picture page 5). Here is a description of the Diamond, original map of the Maya world:

As all the divinities do, Kinich Ahant (the Lord Sun) drinks red blood to come to life again and again. The sun covers gradually every corner of the world.

The red colour of the Cosmic Diamond (Chac) represents the beginning of time, dawn, the East where the Maya direct sacrifices and worships. The Grand Chac, the master of gods, dwells in the East and rules the Earth, commands the rain and storm clouds in exchange of red offerings.

Yellow (Kan) is in the South, colour of ripe maize, harvest time. The Lord Sun is in his height when he comes to the South. The day God Jaguar keeps the golden site.

Black (Ek) dominates the West, colour of night, death, destruction, hell, agony. The Lord Sun goes down in the dark West every night where 9 nasty devils and the black God of War live.

White (Zac) in the North, is the colour of movement, change, freezing wind that blows from the South and brings rain. The Lord Huracàn is the keeper of the North realm.

The Maya cosmic diamond is a cosmic map which symbolizes first the physical map of the Maya world and allows us to visualize Maya beliefs and displays the course of the sun. It is also, secondly, the representation of the cycle of life: birth, maturity, death, and re-birth. And finally, it corresponds to the Maya main agricultural activity which rhythms the seasons, the cycle of maize culture. The diamond includes all the elements of their environment like gods, maize, winds, wasps, birds, trees, era, planets, plague…

The Maya think that the gods and the earth are nourished with blood; it’s the reason why sacrifices are necessary. In return, the divinities pour rain over the land. The blue rain is important to bloom the yellow seed burrowed beneath the black earth. It’s from the underworld that grows the vivid green new life that forecasts a new harvest of yellow maize. Then, the field dies again and sheds its colour into white. Out of sacrifice, blood turns water and that leads to a continuous chain of propitiation-precipitations.

Green is the most significant colour in Amerindian civilization. The most important gem is jade. The most beautiful items are of jade or in green, like plumes. The Aztec emperor’s headdress, Moctezuma, was made of the long green plume of the quetzal, a disc in jade, and tiny golden beads.

Each colour can represent the same concept but with different meanings. For example, green is often used to paint tombstones for it symbolizes life, duration. It is to show how the dear departed is loved and supported during his long haul to Black Death and pleaded to a final renascence of his soul. Red is associated to death as a symbol of renascence and new life. Blue represents water and the passage to the beyond.

The Cosmic diamond also determines the symbolism of form. Life is a circle, for everything  follows the same process of constant renewal. Round-shaped elements are often drawn in Aubrey Williams’ pictures. For example, in Symphony N° 2, we can see a vortex in the right-hand corner and a feeling that it attracts the other four elements. In Olmec Maya – Moon Time III, we can notice another kind of vortex shaped out of a diamond. We get the impression that the round- and diamond-shaped elements are revolving around each other in the dark blue cosmos. 

Form and colour are everywhere in Maya life, even the Maya houses are always painted specially in yellow that is the good colour for house and family. The gods give colour and form to the living beings, which they take out of the living once they die. At the genesis of Maya people, the divinities gave their blood mixed with maize to create the individual.

Colour is also associated with figures in Aubrey Williams’ work to characterize and convey the emotions of the character evoked. The Jaguar is one of the supernatural characters in Amerindians’ mythology. In The Keeper of the Temple he is red, colour that renders the myth of the Jaguar who needs blood to live for ever. The jaguar is a sacred animal that represents the natural forces of universe. This sacred icon sometimes wears ornament and a scarf. In The Keeper of the Temple he is dotted with blue-green spots which reinforce his important position. He’s the Keeper of graves and temples, living in hell, and deters possible tomb raiders. Symbol of power, earth, night, nature forces, he is a sacred animal along with serpent & bird.  He is actually an avatar of the dead and the living. The men would sacrifice blood to the Jaguar, offer him jade figure, wear masks, dance and crack whips to imitate the sound of thunder. The Olmec are said to have been ancestors of the Jaguar. The Jaguar’s mouth reminds of the inside of the earth and the ocellus on the jaguar’s skin can be compared to the ones on the plume of the peacock. These remind of several eyes that give a mythic dimension to the animal figure in setting him in an omniscient position and bestowing upon him a power of luring the enemy at the same time.

In Mesoamerica the jaguar icon first appeared in the art of the Olmec civilization (1250–400 BCE) as monumental stone sculptures and intricate jade carvings, such as those found at sites such as La Venta and San Lorenzo in eastern Mexico. A common image is a half-human, half-feline creature with characteristic downturned snarling mouth, which has been interpreted as a were-jaguar—the supernatural offspring of Olmec rulers and mythical jaguar beings. Some sculptures depict what are regarded as shamans transforming into spirit felines. Broadly contemporary was the cult center of Chavín de Huántar in Peru (850–200 BCE), where startling images of jaguars and animals and humans with jaguar features were carved in stone, cast in gold, and worked in textiles and pottery. A decorative frieze at Chavín shows a procession of carved-stone jaguars and humans with feline fangs and claws, some of which appear associated with the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and which in turn indicates a shamanic religion. Aztec rulers also appropriated jaguar imagery. The emperor wore jaguar apparel in war and held court seated on thrones draped with the animal's pelt. Tezcatlipoca, the supreme Aztec deity, was patron of royalty and inventor of sacrifice whose alter ego was a huge jaguar known as Tepeyolotl. At the center of the Aztec universe—the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City)—complete feline bodies were interred with balls of jade gripped in their fangs. The temple was regarded mythologically as the "cosmic water mountain," jade symbolized water, and the jaguar was associated with fertility.

As for the rabbit figure that pops up in the top right-hand corner of The Keeper of the Temple, he is the little God Rabbit that often appears in Olmec-Maya artefacts under the form of a scribe who is writing a book. The Maya would catch sight of the God Rabbit on the moon’s face. The Goddess Moon would hold him in her arms. The presence of such a character can be interpreted as the willing of the artist (who is actually a scribe) to renew with the Amerindian tradition that consists of going ahead with the traditional process of life but in a modern way: propitiation-protection; as human future and environment are in danger

The mythic dimension is also conveyed through the landscape, peculiarly through the mountains. The Maya believe that their first ancestors live in the mountains which have tops that touch the sky and which have caves and craters that dig their way down to the underworld where souls follow their course. So, lake and mountain are elements strongly based in Maya beliefs. These form the meeting point between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. We can notice that Aubrey Williams is fascinated by magma, volcano, lava, rock face in his paintings (see The Keeper of the Temple for instance). The artist mixes beauty and destruction by painting red fire.

In Night and the Olmec we can see one of the 17 famous Olmec Colossal Heads carved from basalt that can be distinguished as a foil to the red area. The Huge Heads are from 1.45 m to 3.40 m high and can weigh until 50 tons. The first head was found in 1862 and the last one in 1994 in Mexico. Scientists suggest the possibility that the heads were brought on rafts over great distances from the Gulf to the sites where they were found (in San Lorenzo, La Venta, Tres Zapotes and Rancho La Cobata); there was no trace of basalt in these places. Aubrey Williams painted the head in blue with water bubbles probably to remind of the transportation method. The heads are supposed to be ball players - as it is a common sport in Meso-America – or portraits of ancestors and important persons. Each head is unique according to the features and mimic on the face, and according to the type of helmet they wear.

Characters and places often come along with glyphs in Amerindian artefacts and scriptures.

The association of glyph, colour, character and landscape enable the Maya to communicate through time and space. Aubrey Williams makes a use of this same association to convey his conception of life that is similar to Amerindian’s. Aubrey Williams literally writes spirituality as he introduces Olmec Maya hieroglyphs in his paintings, particularly in the Olmec Maya series. One can notice for example the use of numeric system units in The Keeper of the Temple. One dot corresponds to the number one, whereas the bar represents the number five, and the cross the number 0. The Maya used to sign their pieces of work by adding five dots which mean ‘bi’ taken from the phrase ‘ts’ib’ meaning ‘His Writing’.

All these intricate references to Olmec Maya civilisation show that was Aubrey William’s field of study. And many people misunderstood the reasons. The artist explains: “I have 5 races inside me, but the dominant one is West African”. Williams never denied his negritude, however he feels all the races inside him. He feels Guyanese and therefore, multiracial. He establishes the unity of African, Indian, Amerindian, British, Portuguese and Chinese cultures “Ploughing through me are all identity directions”. He thinks that the power of spirit is more essential than colour of skin. Like Wilson Harris, Aubrey Williams trace the line of unity between the different peoples who live all over the world. “Unity is the basic necessity without which we cannot achieve full humanity.” They use the same technique of combination along with the deconstructionist movement in order to identify and dismantle binary opposites. They claim the existence of non-opposition not only between human origins but also between present and past. The authors of The Empire Writes Back state that the antagonistic energies of the past transform themselves, in the present, into a creative syncretism. Wilson Harris and Aubrey Williams use then experimental technique of ‘intentional oxymorons’.

Aubrey Williams wants to trim off the cleavage between history, race and art. Amerindian art writes Amerindian history in confrontation with the ‘official history’ written by the colonizer. For the colonizer history is considered as ‘official’ just because it is written on paper in a European language. But it is untrue in reality.

It is important to draw a parallel between the Maya mistakes of the past and modern humanity. We should learn from the past. Whatever the part of the world we live in, the Maya experience is useful. “The Maya could not keep up with its technology, and its technology took control of the environment and destroyed it”. The artist is preoccupied by the ecological problems we are facing. Thanks to Williams, the Maya lesson will pass over because writing or painting gives life to messages. He portrays the Amerindian spirit as a force that continues to endure in a rapidly transforming world.

Williams is seen as “the painter of renascence who has been affected in an original way by an Amerindian resurrection” according to Wilson Harris. Amerindians and humankind need Amerindian art to realize that Amerindian history is as viable as any human history, and can be applied to any culture. Williams’ series on the music of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who expressed so vividly European anguish over the Second World War and his own battles with the Soviet state, was painted over ten years or so. Although the images of the Shostakovich series are less obviously Amerindian, there are geometric forms reminiscent of the Maya and Aztec aesthetic. Williams deliberately showed in his paintings a respect for the structure of the music by reflecting it in the structure of the paintings. His colours, still vibrantly South American, reinforce the emotion of the music.

To conclude, Amerindian hieroglyphs, colours, forms, mythic characters give movement to the writing. The rhythms of tone and colour in Aubrey Williams’ pictures are alive with Amerindian symbols that seem to express movements in time and sensibility. We learn that there is no limit to the power of art in space and time. What a people lived in the past can also be applied to a topical event whatever the span of time and space. Art can be read as a fable which lets you guess what the moral of the story is. Art takes a universal dimension in so far as it is used to convey a message to humankind. And one can notice that the scale of subjects tackled in painting is unlimited: We can paint history, moral, music, and anything else.

Bibliographie

Michel D.Coe, L’Art maya et sa caligraphie.

Mary Ellen Miller, L’Art précolombien. La Méso-Amérique.

Jeffrey Becom, Villages peints des Maya. Photographies.

Walmsley Anne, Guyana Dreaming. The Art of Aubrey Williams.

Useful websites:

http://www.geocities.com/thetropics/shores/9253/aubrey_williams.html

http://www.jcls.net/excerptv2n1_2.html

http://www.everyculture.com/Ge-It/Guyana.html

http://www.horniman.ac.uk/more/releases/press-atoc.php

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/olmec-colossal-heads-1.htm

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_olm%C3%A8que

http://www.evertrobles.com/ezine4-004.htm

http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/williams/index.shtml

Some paintings by Aubrey Williams:

Symphony N°2 Opus 14 with Chorus to the Poetry of Alexander Bezymensky

Olmec Maya – Moon Time III

Olmec Maya – The Keeper of the Temple

Night and the Olmec 

Dominique Giboyau, Writing Spirituality in Aubrey Williams’ Art. Amerindian Inspiration, October 2007.