"Until now, only visitors to the National Gallery of Guyana would have had any chance of recognising just how outstanding an international artist Denis Williams was. This book presents a unique and long-overdue opportunity for the reader to access his art in all its range and variety, not least because its author, his daughter Evelyn A. Williams, provides access to paintings and drawings held by the family, rarely if ever seen before. What the book represents is a story of both an outstanding talent, praised world-wide, by the likes of Henry Moore and Salvador Dali, and a journey of searching integrity in which Williams placed the necessity of his vision before any urge to win the plaudits of fame and fortune in the art world. It is a story of a constant need to expand the forms of his art and to escape from constriction." -- Book jacket.
Denis Williams, painter, teacher, novelist, archaeologist, and cultural administrator, is one of the founding fathers of modern Guyana. His involvement in several of the country’s key cultural institutions and his pioneering work on Guyana’s founding peoples ensures him a special place in the country’s history books. Williams also contributed to the outpouring of literature that accompanied the awakening consciousness of Caribbean nations and their drive for independence. His literary work is seminal in depicting the character of the Caribbean person and landscape, and the nature of ancestral (African and Afro-Caribbean) identities. His studies of African art and culture encouraged the young nation of Guyana to turn away from Western epistemologies and to pay serious intellectual attention to other origins. His research into the archaeology and culture of the Amerindian population of Guyana and beyond laid the pathway for further scholarship. The essays assembled here bring together eminent scholars and commentators to offer authoritative analyses of the various aspects of Williams’s work – artistic, academic, and literary – and capture the rationale for, the interconnections between, and the evident trajectory of Williams’s life work as the epitome of the changing nature of the Caribbean condition. As well as wide-ranging biographical essays, and studies of Williams’s activities as a painter, the collection contains a comprehensive primary and secondary bibliography, a generous selection of colour plates, and individual essays devoted to the published novels (Other Leopards; The Third Temptation) and other published and unpublished fiction, and to Williams’s archaeological masterpiece, Prehistoric Guiana. Contributors: Ulli Beier, Vibert Cambridge, David Dabydeen, Charles Gore, Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris, Louis James, Andrew Jefferson–Miles, Nicholas Laughlin, Andrew Lindsay, John Picton, Leon Wainwright, Anne Walmsley, Charlotte Williams, Evelyn A. Williams, Jennifer Wishart.
Lionel Froad hopes to rediscover Lobo, his alter ego from ancestral times, while on an architectural survey in the horn of Africa. Instead, he finds himself having complex relationships between his filial, white boss and a stunning girl from Wales, both of whom distract him from his goal. Eventually, Lionel is forced to recognize the painful division between his New World self and ancestry as a result of slavery and centuries of separation.
Soul Exchange is an exploration of the art and life of Dennis Paul Williams, a St. Martinville native who has made a lifelong career painting spirits in their heavenly realm. Williams was driven as a child to draw, paint, and explore artistic materials as he embraced his Creole heritage, where every aspect of life revolves around faith, celebration, and beauty. Williams's works have evolved into expressions of his deep spirituality. The objects he creates are imbued with beauty and intrinsic spiritual power. He has works in numerous museums in the U.S. and beyond. Many of his paintings can also be found in private collections around the world. Wiliams has also enjoyed a parallel career as a guitarist for twenty-six years in his brother's band, Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha Chas. The relationship between Williams's art, both music and painting, and his spirituality seem to embrace one word: healing. Whether an individual is overcoming illness, loneliness, or despair, Williams's art offers a prayer and moment of counseling. Soul Exchange presents over one hundred works by the artist. It also includes a portrait of Williams by book editor Philip Gould as well as an overview of his art by former Louisiana Poet Laureate Darrell Bourque.
For more than 25 years Denis Williams, one of Guyana's most accomplished scholars, travelled from one end of the country to the other conducting surveys and excavations. The result is the first comprehensive reconstruction of the history and characteristics of human settlement of the Guianas. In this work of painstaking scholarship, Denis William integrated a wide variety of evidence from original research with previously published archaelogical, geological, ecological, ethnographic, climatic and even nutritional data to develop the first major synthesis of the prehistory of Guyana. Prehistoric Guiana includes over 250 sketches, photographs, maps and tables as well as an extensive bibliography.
Evelyn A. Williams, a former teacher of art and design, is a practising painter with a recently established studio in Guyana, where she applies the principles of Mbari. Current research interests include Denis Williams's artworks and the vernacular architecture of the Village Movement. --Book Jacket.
Discusses prehistoric civilization as represented by art and artifacts of the period, including weapons and tools, architecture, cave paintings, engravings, and statues.
Everything Explained That Is Explainable is the audacious, utterly improbable story of the publication of the Eleventh Edition of the legendary Encyclopædia Britannica. It is the tale of a young American entrepreneur who rescued a dying publication with the help of a floundering newspaper, and in so doing produced a series of books that forever changed the face of publishing. Thanks to the efforts of 1,500 contributors, among them a young staff of university graduates as well as some of the most distinguished names of the day, the Eleventh Edition combined scholarship and readability in a way no previous encyclopedia had (or ever has again). Denis Boyles’s work of cultural history pulls back the curtain on the 44-million-word testament to the age of reason that has profoundly shaped the way we see the world.
The Dinka have a connoisseur's appreciation of the patterns and colours of the markings on their cattle. The Japanese tea ceremony is regarded as a performance art. Some cultures produce carving but no drawing; others specialize in poetry. Yet despite the rich variety of artistic expression to be found across many cultures, we all share a deep sense of aesthetic pleasure. The need to create art of some form is found in every human society.In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis: how the feelings that we all share when we see a wonderful landscape or a beautiful sunset evolved as a useful adaptation in our hunter-gather ancestors, and have been passed on to us today, manifest in our artistic natures. Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for? These questions have long been asked by scholars in the humanities and in literature, but this is the first book to consider the biological basis of this deep human need.This sparking and intelligent book looks at these deep and fundamental questions, and combines the science of evolutionary psychology with aesthetics, to shed new light on longstanding questions about the nature of art.
