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| THE NORTH Coast road hugs the foothills
of the Northern Range, so that at times you are driving on a ledge between
towering cliff face and sheer precipice to the crashing sea below. Further
on, it meanders more gently across ten or twelve bridges over the Yarra
river. Though the hour's drive may seem somewhat daunting, the prospect
of Blanchisseuse at the end of the road is a rewarding one: the beach with
its rushing waves and the slothful Marianne river just barely breaking
over the silted mouth; the openness of the people.
It is here that British born artist Jerry Gordon quite by accident came to put down his paints, his canvasses. It is here that he has decided to settle his soul's search, for the next six months at least. He is at home in the tiny Almond Brook cottage that is a step across from the beach. Jerry Gordon, social worker, artist, world traveller, came to Trinidad about 5 weeks ago, to a country in the throes of Carifesta. He was ‘led' here, he believes, just as he was led to Blanchisseuse and to Almond Brook. He dreamed of Trinidad, he says, when he was five. Born in chilly Lancashire on the west coast of England, he would have had no notion of a tropical island environment, but he is certain that it was Trinidad in his dreams: ‘Warm,” he says, is how it felt with a sense of lushness, and a warm sea rather than the cold Irish channel to which he was accustomed. It was in the same year he almost drowned. This experience, he remembers, was one that defined his separateness, his “own self." He remembers his mother knitting on the beach, even as he was struggling not to drown. |
Throughout his life, he says, although
he is not a religious person, he has been aware of “something Other," a
positive guiding force. When he has chosen to ignore it, things have invariably
gone wrong. When he has been aligned with it, he has been empowered, gifted,
even blessed. This aspect of himself he calls affectionately, "Chudi."
One event that stands out in his memory, and which now colours his life, occurred in Egypt. “You can't spit there, if it doesn't bring a crowd of begging children around,” he says of Egypt. Anyway, he was walking along when a little boy approached him, “Shoeshine, mister?" He looked at the boy, and even though he didn't need his shoes shined, thought that maybe the child had a family that needed the money. So he sat down and had his shoes shined. As the boy finished the job, a powerful explosion rocked the area. The square to which Gordon was heading when he stopped for his shoeshine was the centre of the bombing. He looked around for the little boy who timely stopped him for a shine: ‘I was ready to give him everything I had!” But the child was gone, and Gordon swears to this day, "That was my guardian angel. I was…touched by an angel.” It was not too long afterwards that other events moved him along the path on which he is now firmly planted. In 1996, he travelled down the centre of the USA, along the Mississippi valley. By the end of the journey, he felt that there was an immense truth that hewn on the verge of finding. This precipitated nine years of travel and work all over the world. |
What evolved was an intense study
of some of the world's significant religious sites, including some of the
best-known cathedral buildings: Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain; London's
Westminster Abbey (which will be 1000 years in 2000); St. Sophia in Istanbul,
Turkey the Taj Majhal in Agra, the Golden Sikh Temple at Amritsar, the
Buddhist Temple at Sarnath and the Hindu Temple at Varanasi in India; the
Wailing Wall in Israel; St Peter's in The Vatican; Uppsala Cathedral in
Sweden; St George's Cathedral in Guyana; Chartres Cathedral in France.
Among some ancient sites are Stonehenge, The Parthenon, Knossos Palace at Crete, Aztec and Mayan temples. He is also seeking prayer symbols of the Caribs, North American Indians and peoples of the south Pacific. One project that took him to the South Pacific was a recreation of the voyage of the Bounty. He spent six months in Polynesia and three months on the island of Pitcairn, home to the descendants of the Bounty mutineers. Work with the Merseyside police produced an identikit of Fletcher Christian on their computer system, from which Gordon painted a portrait. His exhibition “A Portrait of Fletcher Christian and Pitcairn Island Landscapes” attracted wide attention. Other recent painting projects include “Daubs” with the Liverpool City Council in 1994, and painting Palamos, the Catalonian fishing village in Spain, in 1990-91. The current project for which he recently sold his house and car in Liverpool, is called Project 2000. |
It will, he says, “visually demonstrate
and celebrate the common practice of peoples around the world to go to
great lengths to build sacred sites to honour their spirituality.” He hopes
to have substantial canvases (each approximately four feet by six feet),
each painting of a building (representing consciousness), to include a
universal symbol such as the moon (symbol of the sub-conscious).
In one week at Blanchisseuse, he completed eight paintings; he felt so energised. Coming to Blanchisseuse was another story. He was driving randomly, in the week after he arrived here. Port-of-Spain seemed too hot, too frenetic over Carifesta VI. He “took his hand off the wheel” and followed his “guide” along the Ari-ma-Blanchisseuse road. Somewhere in the heart of the forest he felt his mind clearing. And when two youngsters signalled for a ride, he stopped. By the time the road opened to Blanchisseuse, he knew where he was heading. It remained for him to find a place to stay. “Junior (one of the hitch-hikers) introduced me to Helens, and I am now resident in Almond Brook (beach cottage) to paint,” he concludes with satisfaction. He feels he was meant to be here, in Trinidad. The recent visit by the Dalai Lama was one coincidence: he had tried without success to see him in Dharmasalla and he felt that just being on the same island was significant. That the cottage Almond Brook once housed an old village church is another pleasing fact. At the end of his project, Gordon expects to have about 40 paintings which he will exhibit in London, in Trinidad, and in as many places around the world as possible. |