Cricket as Art
A year or two ago, I attended an art exhibition hosted by CLICO, featuring the work of Wendy Nanan, a Trinidad and Tobago artist. Her display featured paintings of cricket, and that was primarily what drew me.Most of the art on cricket that I have seen are realistic depictions of scenes and players. Faithful renditions of grounds, buildings, pitches at play, players captured at their glorious moments, wrought through the use of photographs to freeze the moments.
I am no expert on art, but what I saw when I walked into Wendy's exhibition was a delightfully different perspective of cricket that seemed true art to me.
Her paintings were all lines, curves and shadows, yet she conveyed movement and form. Her groupings of players, maybe two or three in a frame, were arresting in the way familiar postures were rendered. Her use of colour was spare, as was the number of elements contained in each frame, but altogether, the body was rich and full of nuance, as the entire collection told a wonderful story of the game that is itself a work of art.
I have to admit that I was quite taken by her work, applauding it for the imaginative approach she had taken to a subject that has been generally frontally covered. I suppose I felt some affinity to it because as someone who has spent more than a decade writing on cricket, I have never felt myself able to use the common lens to see it. There are several cricket writers who report on the game, they tell you what happened on the field and all the news related to it. I admire the ability to sit through a match and be able to relate the strokes and statistics. I cannot do that simply because that is not what grips me when I watch.
I suppose my interest has always been centred on trying to understand the minds at work and the conditions under which those minds function. It must be the incorrigible excavator in me, forever trying to get under the surface. Maybe that was what I recognised in Wendy's work: something burrowing past the details of a photograph to get to the essence. There is no detail here, rather there is a focus on form, and in the beautifully articulations of lines and curves playing upon shadow, there is something that has stripped away all distraction to reveal the core of cricket as art.
I was reminded of this because Wendy Nanan is supposed to be exhibiting her work to open a conference on cricket scheduled to take place in London from March 1-3. Her exhibition is titled Beyond Boundaries, and will run for the month of March at the Art Worker's Guild in London's Bloomsbury. While the conference is being organised by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, it was actually Wendy's concept, and it disturbed me to hear of the difficulty in raising funds to ship her work and mount and manage the exhibition.
The plight of artists is always so heart-rending because we never seem able to rise enough to help support the very art that does so much to illuminate lives that could otherwise be so drab and mundane. Our corporate citizens seem readier to sponsor fast returns than invest in our culture.
I wanted to write about Wendy's exhibition not only because I admire her work and feel she has brought something new and important to the way we see cricket, but also to encourage anyone who can assist this exhibition to come off to feel free to do so. Wendy can be reached by email at w_m_nanan@yahoo.com and organiser, Dee Burn of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies can be reached at dee.burn@sas.ac.uk.
I think it is important that the work of this woman of the West Indies be seen. Our history of support for the arts may prove me naïve yet again, but hope springs eternal.