Stanley Greaves b . British Guiana 1934 ; works in North Carolina , USA
Bread Man , 2001 Acrylic on canvas scroll Courtesy of the artist
Stanley Greaves ’ artistic career has flourished in Guyana and throughout the Caribbean . After working in Barbados for almost two decades , Greaves migrated to the United States in 2008 .
Employing the aesthetic of French Surrealists painters , Greaves draws from his boyhood growing up in an impoverished Georgetown tenement yard in creating the self-referential painting Bread Man . Two dark , unclothed figures border the canvas : one carries a loaf of bread , the other has an empty board . What the figures carry is a commentary on “ hope and despair ” states the artist . Greaves also adds subtle singular objects of biographical symbolism — an empty shot glass , a bent nail , a leafy garnish — that further references Surrealism . The more obvious symbolic object , the shadowy square hole in the ground , is centered in the canvas . The artist hints at migration as a movement through physical , psychological , and spiritual spaces , noting that one implication of the hole in the ground is an “ emerging from the bowels of the earth or descending into it , or even both . . . an illustration of duality , forms of paradox , and the surreal that pervades our existence .”