SCORES of viewers at the third ‘Main Big Lime’ staged in Georgetown two weeks ago were taken with the array of sculpture and carvings in a host of Guyana’s wood products.

Some of the items displayed were smoothly rendered abstract forms in a variety of shapes and sizes, while others were examples of representational art depicting familiar figures of this country’s hinterland landscape. Figures included the pork-knocker and his batel, and the Amerindian hunter with his tribal trappings. Rastafarian with their trademark dreadlocks were portrayed in dramatic style, and the very popular sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi stepped forth with arresting power and technical artistry.

Quite a few of the artistic carvings could be labelled ‘tourist art’, and on most shopping days similar items could be seen decorating the northern precincts of Guyana Stores Limited. Some of the human figures bear witness to their makers’ lacking sense of proportion. Yet, these criticisms aside, the wooden carvings and sculpture produced by Guyanese artists and craftsmen these days bespeak of an innate creative impulse finding channels for expression.

Many of these artists can be described as primitive, since they have had no formal training for what they so marvellously produce. Many of them are impelled by their Rastafarian spirituality, which has been proved to inspire wonderful poetry and infectious melodic chants.

Clearly, some artists adopt the style of Roderick Bartrum, one of this country’s most accomplished sculptors of the human form. It was Bartrum who first produced the miniature Gandhi sculpture in the days of the mid-1980s. Other present-day carvers follow the cosmic lead of the late brilliant Guyanese sculptor, Omowale Lumumba. An artist, whose magnificent output belied his personal humility, Lumumba would work for years on a particular section of wood until he felt fully satisfied with his production.

What animus drives an artist to look at a section of a tree trunk and envisage a finished work, which would be an unending source of pleasure to a viewer?

The ancient Greeks believed, it is said, that a human form languished in every block of wood or section of marble waiting to be liberated by the sculptor. When the artist picks up his chisel and begins to work on the section of tree trunk or the block of marble, an incredible communion begins between the sculptor and the medium. This communion would continue until the form is finally liberated in all its awesome beauty and power.

Omowale Lumumba once said that although he often envisaged the form he wanted to carve when he began to work, he felt “guided by the grain” of the wood. And this wonderful dynamic would continue to the final finish of the piece.

In his book “Civilisation, A Personal View”, Kenneth Clarke describes two unfinished figures by Michelangelo in these words: “…Michelangelo has turned them from athletes into captives, one of them struggling to be free - from mortality? - and the other sensuously resigned, ‘half in love with easeful death’…. These two are carved out in the round, but the others, which are usually assumed to be part of the same set, are unfinished. Their bodies emerge from the marble with a kind of premonitory rumbling that one gets in the Ninth Symphony, and then sink back into it.

To some extent the rough marble is like shadow in a Rembrandt - a means of concentrating on the parts that are felt most intensely; but it also seems to imprison the figures - in fact they are always known as prisoners, although there is no sign of bonds of shackles. As with the finished captives one feels that they express Michelangelo’s deepest preoccupation: the struggle of the soul to free itself from matter.”

Guyanese artists might be light-years away from the classical sculpture that distinguishes European civilisation. Yet, in their humble and unique productions, local sculptors succeed wonderfully at expressing through indigenous woods all that is uplifting and ennobling of the universal human spirit.