Does it surprise you that the number three is associated with creativity and fresh ideas? In the tradition of Taoism, (originating in China) it was written that: “One gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to the ten thousand things.”
And so one has a sense that the creative aspect of the Three Cities is ready to take off, with the promise of emergence into thousands of fresh creative possibilities for the future. This retrospective, by artist Caroline Said Lawrence, is a springboard for art and craftsmanship in a shared community.
For Caroline community is in her blood. She believes that art and culture challenges and nourishes the living and thriving presence of craftsmanship within the dense local and foreign population who thrive here.
This is a creativity that continues to excite and to embrace, an ever increasing local and foreign mix. L-Ilwien Tat-Tlett Ibliet (Colours of the Three Cities), which is running this month, aims to bring the Maltese and the foreigners together in a sense of community, a community that supports her drive to create, combined with her love for the south and her wish to empower the Three Cities.
Grand Harbour is beautiful and offers a majestic landscape, but it is the people who add the charm
When Caroline came to settle on the island she discovered that her great grandfather, Giuseppi Said was Maltese. Her wish is to celebrate our sense of oneness and unity within the community, and to acknowledge whole-heartedly our sense of sharing the same space within our restored and golden-stoned bastions.
Sales of paintings and prints from the exhibition are being donated to the Community Chest Fund. The majority of the works are originals and, for the lover of prints, there is a collection of 12 Baroque doorways – depictions of doors from within the houses and buildings of Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Senglea.
Art and culture keep Caroline’s pulse beating. Art fuels and fills all of us with an awareness and an education about the skills that interplay within our cities and that pay a worthy tribute to our legacy.
Why encourage people to collect art?
I understand that Maltese people like original art. Foreigners are more partial to both original works, and print media. The social fabric of art helps people to see the details in their surroundings and to appreciate the natural environment around them. We are getting more and more divorced from nature and more and more isolated. I focus on urban areas. I’m showing people that even in a built up area there is so much beauty and much to be curious and observant about.
So would you say that your art is an uplifting and good for well-being?
The contemporary art world can be inclined to put pressure on artists to make art works that are meaningful and sometimes ‘dark’ and that say something about the state of society. This is generally called protest art.
My art doesn’t obviously say anything about society. I want to create uplifting art. I am drawing attention to how I, and you, can see colour and shape for that is one of the most valuable insights. When I first began painting, here in Malta, I went to a prestigious gallery and presented a painting of a café with people milling around, in a coastal bay.
The café sign also featured in the narrative. But the gallerist took a view that the collectors were not interested in the ordinary goings on of cafe life and aspired to other subjects. I maintained my belief and continue to put people and ordinary life, and now the ordinary lives of people in the Three Cities into my paintings.
You said just now that your art doesn’t say anything about society, and yet it says much about locality and the people.
My art is a record of the time I live in. I resolved to put people in to my paintings and when I do that, there is a sense of street life, and social community. You find it in the colour and the shapes; it’s a record of the people who occupy the space and who make it intimate and identifiable.
It’s a record of the cafés where each and all of us can go and be there with ourselves and others, and so inhabit the space. Grand Harbour is beautiful and offers a majestic landscape, but it is the people who add the charm.
Increasingly, more and more children are participating in the creativity that The Three Cities engender
Have you always been an artist in the narrative tradition?
When I started painting in Bahrain, I became known as a painter of Arabesque interiors. I depicted the carpets and the tiles. There were no people in these narratives, reflecting the Arab prohibition on figurative representations. However, as essentially I was a figurative painter within a narrative tradition, I always put clues into these serene places. I’d leave a pair of slippers, or a pair of shoes, so you knew that someone was absent from the room during the moments it was painted.
I wished to convey that people did occupy the space and that people had created these spaces and had lain the tiles and the carpets. I wished for people to feel that they could personally walk in to these calm reflective spaces and inhabit them.
My collage work is where the strong narrative work really comes into its own. This work is autobiographical, in the sense that it depicts themes that particularly resonate with me. Every choice I make – be it the typography or the random writing, is unconsciously done. But, most certainly, it is meaningful on a subconscious level. The faces of my portraits may portray a degree of hardness or, equally, vulnerability, depending on the mood of the viewer.
In this sense, the mood of the person in the portrait is ambiguous and alluring. We project our own sense of self in that moment on to the portrait and so we are effectively interacting with the paintings.
The painting is a mirror of how you are feeling in the moment the portrait catches your gaze. Your response can be immediate, and so in a sense you are invited to recognise yourself. That excites me because it confirms the commonality of human experience.
How do you anticipate your narrative journey to continue?
Once I had settled here and had consciously resolved to represent the Three Cities and to be an artist devoted to painting the highlights of the south, and of Valletta too, I felt nourished by the possibility of opening peoples’ eyes up to the promise that the Three Cities always made and has upheld. That promise was analogous with the phoenix rising from the ashes.
I feel certain that I am in the right place at the right time, and am very proud of that. I ventured forth back in 2004 to choose the Three Cities as a venue, and so have exhibited my oeuvre in the former Casino d’Venezia, Couvre Porte, the Auberge de France and the Maċina in Senglea.
We boldly pioneered the Three Cities as a cultural backdrop aspiring to inspire others to realise that here, within these bastions, lay “the jewels within the crown”.
We work to consolidate the spaces we share, with a sense of soul that has purpose, and which I am proud to be part of. Increasingly, more and more children are participating in the creativity that The Three Cities engender and the parents of those children, are actively encouraging their kids to create. These parents are figuring out that art is something they wish to invest in with respect to their children’s ‘all round’ education as a human being. There is advancement in thought as to the life skills that creativity encourages. And again, I am proud and happy that parents are appreciating the power of art and of art classes.