You Could Tell He Would Mention a Painter …

In the first part of the long poem The Prodigal, Walcott writes: ‘here it comes, the light / out of pearl, out of Piero della Francesca, / (you could tell he would mention a painter)’. He was right: his readers would definitely expect him to mention a painter. Walcott's poems, plays and essays, in fact, are punctuated with references to artists as diverse as Giotto and Vincent Van Gogh or Rembrandt van Rijn and Romare Bearden; characterised by exact chromatism and a careful composition of scenes and arrangements of images, they often establish a creative dialogue with a particular painting or evoke a painter's use of the colour palette, perspective, tonal quality, light and shadows. Likewise, it is not uncommon for Walcott's unpublished papers, notebooks and sketchbooks to contain allusions to or actual cut-outs from reproductions of past masterpieces; even in Walcott's creative writing classes and workshops, references to painters, paintings and painting techniques were not at all unusual. This recurrence of visual references is not altogether surprising if we consider that Walcott began his career as a painter or, at least, as a young man moved by a keen desire to become one.

In Another Life, his 1973 autobiography in verse, Walcott wrote at length about his apprenticeship as a painter with his friend Dunstan St. Omer in the workshop of the St Lucian artist Harold Simmons and explained that, unlike St. Omer who became a distinguished painter and muralist, he decided to focus on writing. Yet, Walcott never stopped painting as testified by reproductions of his own works on the jacket covers of some of his books or the inclusion, in the hardbound edition of the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000), of twenty-six of his watercolours, oils, gouaches and pastels. Over the years, and particularly after the 1990s, Walcott's paintings were also exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions in the Caribbean and the United States; in 1993 one of his paintings was reproduced in a St Lucian stamp, and in 1994 he completed a calendar for Colonial Life Insurance (Clico) with sketches and watercolours accompanied by extracts from his poems and plays.