Global - Truth be told, the history of roycrosse very well authenticates the audacity of death.
On his infantry march through life, the renaissance artist left humanity behind on February 20, 2014, shrugging off cancer that ransacked his body for eight years.
That roycrosse took with him the word that made him free is not incidental - no more than the vicissitudes of living is incidental to the struggle.
The late roycrosse
The Trinidadian-born Baltimorean had rediscovered truth in the arts: drawing, painting, writing, photographing, composing and playing.
His Web series, Cancer Chronicles, bristled with shards and icicles of pain. As though he scooped out the depth of his soul onto the keyboard. No branch can withstand such agony without withering off the limb. His gentle demeanor notwithstanding, the stories peel back to the core of a man whose heart might have been aged in oak wood.
I was introduced to the humanity of roycrosse in a phone interview for a magazine feature a couple of years ago.
roycrosse - Gill Taylor Tyree, Sr.
In time, I gleaned from our conversations his foray - and youthful adventures - in the heady world of pan, and, later, the steel band, the Caribbean’s nascent symphony. Many a cerebral artist came from the grungy, crime-strewn pocket of his hometown Port of Spain. Some left to study in London and New York. He took his potential to Toronto, eventually showcasing his art at exhibitions up an down the east coast of the US, and the state of California, too.
As space-time zoomed by, colorectal cancer was just in the way. He had a children’s book to publish; a recording with his quintet on imminent; and a play dancing in the head.
It wasn’t beneath roycrosse to call about a collaboration on the play. I was disinclined to take the risk. Yet, with his will to live dangling from the echo of his disease in my face, I acquiesced and emailed a Miami Herald feature I’d authored about a Marine who went to war as a hawk and returned home a dove.
Soon, a short documentary was in production.
I surmised that he walked with death, slept with it, worked around it, even as a team of doctors admonished not to make plans. Indeed, time and again, he discharged himself from the hospital to gig for fans in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. (It wasn’t gall but his right to demand that he be present at every discussion doctors convened over his cancer; and damn if they didn’t cave.)
I envisioned him, as well, staring death in the face, and, without mockery, daring it to interfere with his work ethic, which might have become tensive as life grounded down.
In time, he produced images that made you wink. ‘Look at me. Am I not as relevant, or more expressive, than a photograph?’ And his quintet hammered out a soundtrack that fascinated. It featured himself on a relatively old but relaxed steel pan, the dialogue arriving as suites and requiems.
Imagery from the film ‘And Great Showers of Tears Came Down’
In reviewing the pieces for the film, I couldn’t fathom him any less than the embodiment of pan - a latter-day fighter reminiscent of the instrument’s forebears, shunned and shamed alike by a society without balls.
Still and all, a savvy and salient character straight out of heroic novels, roycrosse lived for art and pan and died in their honor. A sort of steely resolve to fashion his own crucifixion.
Thus I’ve been made an acolyte of a fruitful man, who, determined to grind out life to its very essence, literally did so behind his instrument or working on abstractions. Just for the film. He fought to the very end, roycrosse did, instructing his wife, Anelda Peters, in a rapidly diminishing voice, to gather, photograph and email unfinished drawings crucial to postproduction. The widower deserves our respect as much as the artist formerly known as Roy Crosse does.
For sure, in an allegory for truth and sacrifice, the arc took roycrosse from self-definition to self-government.
And that’s the ultimate you can ask for in a man you’ve never seen in the flesh.
Dalton Narine
And Great Showers of Tears Came Down - The Film
Contact
Dalton Narine:
narain67@gmail.com
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