Belmont boy days, and the holy place LeRoy Clarke never forgot

Jerry Besson

When I heard of LeRoy’s death I was not surprised. He had been in poor health for some time. I experienced the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost to have been a better friend.

He was an old friend. Old, in the sense that he and I grew up in what we used to call “the Guns.” That is, the very top of Hermitage Road in Belmont.

Upper Gonzales in those days was mostly a marvellous mango forest that surrounded a very old quarry, in whose depths was a beautiful spring that was surrounded by ancient trees of enormous growth.

LeRoy, I suspect, never forgot this magical place, because so much of his work has the shifting shades of earthy hues and flashes of darting light that reflect the subtle greens and yellows, deep reds and darkest blacks that turn, with a sombre palette, into the staring eyes that glance and shape the primeval sounds that one could almost hear when looking at his paintings.

It was a holy place, this spring of water that rose from a cleft in the rocks. The Spiritual Baptist people knew it and I suspect that the others who came there to remember ancestors born in chains a long time ago also knew it. Because there was always something of theirs that lingered, invisible to the eye but obvious to the sensitivity of the artist.

LeRoy captured and contained in his paintings these fleeting forms of pain and beauty.

He was prolific in his pursuit of capturing pain and beauty. He was daring in a never-ending intention to remember his African roots. He saw eye to eye with love and poetry and found a reflection of it in the women whom he loved and memorialised in his poems and his songs.

His life was a continuum of all of this. It seemed to be happening all at the same time. From his boy days to dying in a lonely bed surrounded by 50, 60 years of work, with eyes too dim to see, but with a heart that was forever searching for the truth that only beauty can express.

LeRoy Clarke was a son that shone for all of us.

You and Eye will meet again, old friend, in that forest by that spring that springs eternal. Not far, just there.

Artist, poet, philosopher LeRoy Clarke passed away, last Tuesday, at age 82.