Meet Roger Garraway. He’s wearing three-quarter-length trousers, an open-neck polo, has the grip of a steel fabricator but has been caressing canvasses with oil paints for most of his 46 years. His unrehearsed modesty and muffled, self-effacing responses are not reflected in the bold sweeps of his paint brushes that have produced “thousands” of landscapes and seascapes—many of them sold to a faithful circle of local art lovers and overseas visitors who might have spotted him on the street outside West Mall up to a few years ago. “They told me that if I sold my paintings on the streets, I won’t do well at art exhibitions,” he says. “But I used to sell a lot of paintings right there…outside West Mall.” Today, he is receiving help from friends who plan to take his work online and to the rest of the world. The name of the Facebook page—The Emerging Artist Studio—projects the mistaken impression of a newbie to the world of visual art, but, for Garraway, it’s his way of re-linking with art lovers he has met over the years and introducing himself to new ones.
Dial the number on the Facebook page and you get a steel fabricating business, but open the photos on the page and you enter the world of an artist whose reminiscences are uniquely Trini.
There’s Blanchisseuse, Toco, Manzanilla, Mayaro and humble housing in the heartland of more rural communities. Based in Febeau Village, Garraway does not have the sea within easy reach, but he places it at his fingertips. “Most of the time I go to the scene and see what there is,” he says. “but sometimes I just imagine what a particular scene looks like.” He has never attended an art class in his life—“I think you can say that I have raw talent”—but does not appear unaware of the tenets of the craft in one of the more difficult media. There’s also little wilful experimentation with the abstract which he considers to be sometimes an affectation to escape responsibility for truthful art.
But this is not that he has paid much attention to what other artists are doing. “I don’t really know what other people are doing,” he says. “I paint what I see and I paint what I believe people would like.” Garraway can no longer be found outside the mall and is being assisted in setting up shop at Petit Bourg. He has exhibited in the past and says he would really like to do so again.“I like to see people enjoy my art,” he says. “Even better if they buy some. This is my only source of income. It is not always easy. But I can’t see myself doing anything else.” Two of his six children are already showing signs of moving in his artistic direction. “I try to encourage them as much as I can,” he says, even as he concedes that life as a professional painter has its rough moments.
For the moment, he is placing much confidence in using new, social media to reach wider audiences and to spread the art of his homeland far and wide.
