Sir Dunstan St. Omer
The reel of life which is Sir Dunstan St. Omer’s began in St. Lucia in the 1930s. He was a sickly child, prone to excessive thinking and day-dreaming. When fantasies exhausted his fragile frame, he would paint. Encouragement from his parents was a decisive factor in his artistic life. The St. Lucia of his childhood has been described as a cultural aridity. Children with an inclination towards art were encouraged by their parents to seek a more useful pastime. Not his parents. He recalls they bought his brushes, paints and paper and urged him on.
In 1946 Dunstan left Saint Lucia for Curacao. In 1948 Castries was destroyed by fire, and most of the artist’s Pre-Curacao works. He returned to St. Lucia at Christmas of 1949, by which time he had come to realize most forcibly the need to belong to his own environment. If his art was going to develop, if he was going to become a true artist, St. Lucia was the best place for him, he thought.
Back home he taught, worked in surveying, then taught again – part-time at St. Mary’s College and at the Extra-Mural Department of U. W. I. A 13 month scholarship to study art in Puerto Rico followed, then home again he became first a sub-editor, then editor of the Voice of St. Lucia. He would later work in construction, paint professionally, and hold a corporate job with the St. Lucia Chamber of Commerce, thereafter. Dunstan was employed as art instructor for schools with the Ministry of Education from 1971 until his retirement in 2000.
To date Dunstan St. Omer has enriched this land with hundreds of paintings. Yet his greatest contribution the development of St. Lucian Society has come through his church murals. For it is here that the artist has been able to take the social revolution began by Harry Simmons in the 1940s one step further. History will tell that this artist is indeed one of the foundation stones of a truly indigenous and St. Lucia Church.
Dunstan St. Omer of 1973 has come a long way since the 1950s. St. Lucians had become cognizant of the Pan Caribbean movement for Black Consciousness. In the island itself, the St. Lucia Forum had begun conducting ‘groundings’. People were becoming more conscious of themselves. Dunstan felt that he had matured into acceptance of his blackness and was ready to help others along. It is with this kind of self confidence and awareness that the artist approached the mural of the Holy Family for the church at Jacmel. He was going to paint that wall, all 800sq ft. of it, with images that reflected the beauty and nobility of his people. Dunstan’s thinking led him to research the historical Christ, only to discover that there are no clear descriptions of what he looked like, no photographs nor pictures; only Europeans paintings which looked European. Moreover, as the artist contemplated the cosmopolitan nature of the Middle East at that time; he came to realize that it was not all ridiculous to think that Christ could have been a black Jew. Dunstan sought every avenue to escape the ‘white Christ’ concept. Thus a chance text from the bible he alleges, claiming that Christ was a tribe not mentioned by Abraham, further convinced him that his Christ must be black. And he observes “I cannot see my people developing, finding happiness, being secure, being free, being wonderful lovely people, if they must of necessity have a white God.
Dunstan has been honoured by every significant institution – Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE), The Papal Medal for his public art in the churches of Saint Lucia, and Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of The West Indies (2009), as a Caribbean Icon and the father of the artistic genre known as “Prismism”. He would later receive a knighthood from Her Majesty the Queen in 2010.