Newcomer from Guiana

A young Negro artist was startling and impressing London gallerygoers last week with a show of paintings as tangled and threatening as the jungles of his home colony, British Guiana. Painted in equatorial reds, yellows and greens, the canvases were packed with figures as sturdy as tree trunks, topped by faces with the wide, open, glowering eyes of frightened animals.

The artist, 27-year-old Denis Williams, was no loincloth primitive. The son of a textile manufacturer, he had gone to high school in Guiana's capital city of Georgetown, worked as a postal clerk. Five years ago some of his spare-time paintings caught the eye of a British Council representative, won him an art scholarship in England.

England's grey stone, gothic cathedrals and trim, bottle-green countryside, and the fleshless abstractions of modern European art, only roused Williams' nostalgia for Guiana. "I'd been too busy trying to understand European art and I'd overlooked the material at my own back door." Last year he went home to Guiana to take another look.

When he returned to England last May, he began sprawling his new ideas on huge canvases, with the jagged outlines of modern cities and the twisting vegetable forms of the tropics, using "that atavistic something" of the primitive artist to illustrate such super-civilized symbols as The Mystic Marriage and Human World.

Williams' savagery and civilization seemed to be paying off. Critic Wyndham Lewis called him a "brilliant newcomer" and an "artist of genius." The Tate Gallery was considering a Williams canvas for its collection. With most of his paintings sold or spoken for. Artist Williams was looking forward to giving up clerking for good, supporting his wife and two children by painting.

What did he call himself? Williams wasn't sure. "I don't know," he said. "Wyndham Lewis called me an existentialist, but I don't know what that means . . . I suppose I'm a human being--but that sounds pompous, doesn't it?"

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