It may be that no major Caribbean artist of our time has been more fecund and versatile than Stanley Greaves of Guyana who turned sixty last November and celebrated with a grand retrospective exhibition in Georgetown. On view was the full range of Greaves' art, from the figurative People of the Pavement series of the fifties and sixties, through the abstract Hearts and Diamonds explorations of the seventies and eighties to the enigmatic, veristic mini-paintings of the nineties. When we take into account the enormously varied work in three dimensions, the wood carvings, multi-media constructs and ceramics, we cannot but be humbled in the presence of such a rare and uncompromising dedication to the creative life. Even the aficionados and art experts who have been paying attention to Greaves' output over the years would have had good reason to be taken aback by these meticulously drawn and painted little pictures, at once full of familiar things and excluding a deep and seemingly perverse strangeness.
Little paintings have some obvious advantages.
Ideal too for travelling exhibitions. One can imagine a small touring exhibition of these little paintings for schools and far flung communities, strangers to the art galleries of the capitals. These practical considerations, however, were the least of Greaves' concerns, if indeed, they occurred to him at all. In the mini-painting, his interest in size is of a different order, more philosophical and aesthetic. Greaves calls them mini-paintings to distinguish them from the earliest miniatures that enjoyed a vogue in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, portraits for the most part, which, painted on vellum and replete with arcane symbolism and allegory, proclaim their derivation from medieval manuscript illumination.