”I once thought becoming an artist meant to sail away from St. Martin, from childhood. Life has taught me otherwise.”
Roland Richardson, of middle years and lean, wipes up the lunch dishes and set out a few scraps for the cats. Children scramble underfoot, eventually cascading out the kitchen door into the barnyard.
The wooden house is West Indian, swathed in flowering bush. Goats graze in the pasture and up the hillside. Hardly the postcard of Caribbean romance- no beach, no turquoise sea.
”But the light of this valley! It changes wonderfully. Let me show you.” The artist hauls out a dozen landscapes stacked behind a bench-routing more cats in the process. Sweating in the heat, he begins to line them up side by side.
”Now this one-morning, about seven o`clock. And that, noon. Here, late afternoon, maybe five thirty. See what I mean? These are all April. On the other side, here, we have November. How changed the yellows are-of course the greens! Wet season and dry. Subtle changes. Fascinating. Want to see the site for these? Just look out that window, up the valley.”
Island`s rich variety
More canvasses are made to appear. Paintings, etchings and frames cover every surface of the studio-floor and table, hanging on the walls, propped against household appliances. ”Many tourists think we have one raison d`etre here-to warm their bodies. But art can make us see the rich variety of St. Martin. That`s what art is for.”
Richardson`s sunburnt visage, his beard and ardent blue eyes recall a New Bedford whaling captain churning through southern latitudes. In reality he`s a son of St. Martin-this green, volcanic isle, half-Dutch, half-French and known nowadays for its condos and chic creole restaurants. The rustic beauty of St. Martin has been scarred by ambitious resort development, especially on the Dutch side of the island.
The vacation industry provides jobs but threatens to destroy the island`s easygoing charm.
”Many of the scenes I painted a few years ago-countryside, old houses, secluded bays-no longer exist,” reflects Richardson. ”Sometimes I feel that my work has taken on a purely historical function-`here`s the way people used to live, the way the island used to look.` ”
Can St. Martin be developed for tourism while retaining-or regaining-its natural loveliness? ”Strangely enough, I believe it can,” says Richardson.
”This is a real challenge, but it`s a question of survival. If we fail, St. Martin will be lost. Then everyone will suffer.”
St. Martin is a divided spirit in more ways than one. Its 37 square miles and 50,000 population is administered half by the Netherlands, half by France. ”As for Dutch and French,” smiles Richardson, ”many St. Martiners can`t really command either language. We mostly speak English-a curious local brand of it. Our forefathers were New England sea farers, Irishmen, a European stew thoroughly spiced up with Africans.”
Richardson has begun to champion a new cultural awareness in the Caribbean. Discover St. Martin, a magazine of the arts founded and edited by Richardson, spearheads this effort. Displayed all over the islands, it also sells pretty well in the bookshops of Paris and London.
”I started Discover because I`d begun to understand that Caribbean culture is misunderstood-even by many Caribbeans. ”Since we were colonials for so long, we saw our history through European and American lenses. But each Caribbean island is unique-ethnically, linguistically, historically. At the same time we have a geographical and even imaginative unity.”
