The Tribune

THE irreplaceable Rolfe Harris – an artist whose work will forever paint a picture of The Bahamas in its fury and its beauty.

The Bahamas punches above its weight in so many ways – in sports, music, the culinary arts, in the romantic allure of the country’s cays no matter what shattering events turn other worlds upside down.

But while athletes bring home more Gold than we ever thought possible and are celebrated in parades and accolades as indeed they should be, it is possible that nowhere is the greatness of Bahamian talent greater than in the visual arts. There are Bahamian artists whose work will be worth unfathomable amounts one day if their body of work is handled properly.

Why? Because what an artist does cannot be duplicated by another artist. As fast as a sprinter is, someday someone will be faster. As high as a high jumper is, someday someone will jump higher. Sports records are made to be broken. An artist’s work will stand forever. And that is why when we lose one of the greats, we feel the loss so profoundly. Brent Malone, a man who took on the persona of whatever he was painting, living the life of a pirate to learn how to hold a pistol for his pirates’ series, patiently photographing a garden for a year from planting seeds to seeing buds, painstaking drawing movement, for a series on Bahamian flowers, Malone with his Junkanoo art, his renaissance-like range of interests, his galleries, gone in 2004 at age 62.

Now Rolfe Harris, perhaps the greatest Realist of them all, has passed away. Although he studied architecture briefly at the urging of his parents, he quickly grew bored and restless. He left school in London, making his way back home to The Bahamas. His creativity showed along with his zealous love of life and he must have cut a romantic figure, a long-haired musician playing with Tommy Goodwin and the Nassauvians and operating a charter boat. It’s likely that short as his time was in the study of architecture, its processes of fine lines and perspective had an impact on the details in his work.

But it was Harris’s fascination with the sea - the relationship between man, boat and water - that defines his work. In Dawn Davies Love & Responsibility, Dr. Erica Moiah James, 1st curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, describes it like this: “Harris’ respect for seamen is altogether linked to their willingness to face head-on decidedly uncertain circumstances that often teeter between life and death. There is something both romantic and quintessentially masculine in the manner in which such men are seen to hold their future in their own hands. Their future depends solely on their ability to think and work their way through crises.”

Harris knew boating. He was a sailor himself, understood the strange silence of a becalmed sea as well as the fiery power of roiling waters with winds whipping waves like a high speed angry blender deep below. His passion showed in every piece, and he worked daily, producing three or four paintings a year, the view from his window on the water from his home on Eastern Road a continuously changing set. Often using his own gardener as a subject, a sole figure in a dinghy, on a sloop, in a fishing boat, Harris painted with an unlikely combination of fury in portraiture and meticulous detail to musculature. Oil was his medium, his wife, Alice, and daughter, Laura, his lifeblood. When Alice died a few years ago, he put down his brushes and never painted again. Laura, a lawyer, looked after him until the very end.

We have lost a friend. The Bahamas has lost one of the greatest talents ever to have picked up a brush and painted a story of these winsome and troublesome islands in the sun.

The new Customs app – dream or nightmare?

We love apps. A new app hits the market and our fingers run to the app store without ever leaving our living room, imagining the power they will have to make life more convenient, more musical, more enlightened. We trust apps to streamline our expenses, find the perfect mate and lead us to our ancestors, though that one requires a little DNA contribution on our part.

So when an app comes along that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and instead twists us up in so many knots we need another app to try to find our way out, it’s not easy for those of us who live in an app-loving world to acknowledge.

When an app fails to make a task easier or faster but actually makes it harder, we’ve got to question it, just like hundreds of weary travellers did this past August holiday weekend when they returned to Nassau. They were the app-angry returning residents caught up in the Customs Hall app conundrum, in some cases, for two hours or more, as they and frustrated travellers around them attempted to navigate the relatively new Customs declaration form app.

First as a disclaimer. I have never personally used the new app which if you are not aware is the digital replacement for the paper Customs declaration form. If you pay bills online or order from Amazon, you know how convenient the digital world is. It’s just that Customs isn’t BPL or Amazon. With the Customs app, there is a galaxy of information you have to search for, input, figure out the percent owed based on the product and if you purchased a dozen products, let’s say, from Trader Joe’s or Walmart you have to search for the description of each product, the percent due, figure out the amount of each and go to the next receipt and do it all over again. It’s the stuff that makes Customs brokers part of a secret society and keeps Customs officers employed and now Grammie is supposed to do it. On her phone.

We are not suggesting that there isn’t hope for a Customs declaration app. There certainly is. But the experience of using the app in its current form without personal assistance available on the spot needs an honest assessment to understand what works, what doesn’t and where the issues lie.

With one returning family this weekend, there were more than a dozen items for which there was no match in the category to figure out the percent owed. Those items ranged from an ordinary kitchen blender and make-up brush to a product called pre-poop spray. For another individual, the issue was place of purchase since that, too, has to be entered. The particular store is part of a chain with 3,400 of those stores worldwide. For a third person, a Bahamian who recently went to Italy with family, the issue was a failed incomplete form because the airport they departed from on their return trip was not listed.

Two suggestions. First, survey users as they emerge and learn where the failings are, what works, what doesn’t. Secondly, place personal assistants in the Customs hall to help people complete the information. That will relieve the stress, help educate the public and make the process less stressful and more acceptable.