It is fitting that the first temporary exhibition at the new National Gallery of the Cayman Islands should be a collection from one of Cayman’s most preeminent artists: Bendel Hydes.
Although Bendel has lived in Manhattan for the past 30 years, he returned to Cayman for the opening of the gallery and will be available for a Meet the Artist event on Monday, 13 February, from 6pm until around 8.30pm.
This will be the ideal opportunity to meet the artist and gain a deeper insight into the processes at work in his paintings.
The exhibition is a series of 12 canvasses (from the collection of Alan and Karen Turner) titled Circumnavigating the Globe, in which the artist takes a journey around the world, with one painting for every 30 degrees of longitude.
It’s a series inspired by the long voyages of Caymanian sea captains of old, but the journey is an imaginary one.
“It’s the nature of people here. Caymanians have always gone overseas a lot. I don’t like travelling all that much, but geography is one of my favourite subjects,” he says.
The journey, perhaps inevitably, begins here. That is, it begins at 90-60 degrees west, the meridians that locate both the Cayman Islands and New York, where the artist now lives. The series travels eastward in the direction of the earth’s rotation. Each work centres on an individual area of interest meandering north or south as it crosses each meridian.
Abstract in nature, each painting measures 78 x 78 inches and all are rich in colour and shadow, hinting at all manner of underlying forms. He begins each canvas with an open mind, he says, and no fixed idea of what he wants the end result to be, although he uses the same methodology and style throughout the series.
“My current mature style is a big development for art itself because some of these techniques were developed in the ’60s, but no one has been doing art in the way I am doing it in terms of the kind of overlays of translucency and having this mean something,” he says. The artist is working on a new series for Alan and Karen Turner.
Meet the Artist
At the Meet the Artist event, Bendel will lead a short discussion on his body of work in the Circumnavigating the Globe collection prior to a walk through of the exhibition. There will also be time for a question and answer session.
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