Larry Santana: A Career of Achievements, Constraints, and Struggle

The eldest of four children, Larry Santana was born in 1962 in his mother’s village on the Ramu River. At three, he moved to Madang when his father found work as a mechanic. At ten, his father’s sudden death made town life precarious and to supplement his mother’s meager wages as a domestic and to pay for school fees he collected bottles from the streets. Keeping the family together was a struggle (Sisii 2004). Like other contemporary PNG artists growing up in the early 1960s, Santana’s artistic development was influenced by late colonial policies of education which aimed at encouraging students to take pride in their own traditions while learning Western knowledge (G. Beier 1974, Rosi 1994). At Tusbab High School, he took art classes from a New Zealand art teacher who stimulated his creative skills and helped him gain admittance to Goroka Technical College. He studied graphics and painting and obtained his diploma in 1980. [4]

Santana’s first job was for an advertising firm in Port Moresby where the Waigani Arts Center and the new National Arts School exposed him to an emerging art world. He began to paint professionally and, in 1983, held his first exhibition at the Waigani Arts Center. In 1986, one of his paintings was selected to represent Papua New Guinea at a conference in Brussels. Santana recalls this achievement with pride as his work was recognized as promoting his country’s culture. Since then, when travelling abroad to attend exhibitions of PNG art, he regards himself as a “Cultural Ambassador” (Rosi 1989; 1992). At the 1998 opening of an exhibition of Contemporary PNG art in Boston attended by the Santana family and the PNG Ambassador, Larry’s wife and daughter wore distinctive meri (women) blouses and long skirts made from fabric designed as the PNG flag (Rosi 2002).

Although Santana has gained national recognition as a painter, his artistic career has been sustained by income earned as a graphic designer. Port Moresby is, however, notorious for its exorbitant prices and employers often offer jobs that include housing. But this practice has a downside since losing a job can also result in being homeless. Santana has experienced this situation twice. In 1988, the advertising firm he worked for went bankrupt and he lived for several months on the city dump, scavenging to feed his family. In 1993, a fire destroyed his apartment and his possessions. Fortunately, he recovered his losses quickly. He was working at a TV station and his advertising sponsors permitted him to broadcast a public appeal for help. Response was swift: the family was offered new housing and friends gave money.

In the mid-1990’s, as Santana gained increasing recognition as an artist, he began attracting growing numbers of private clients seeking his design services, including commissions from wantoks (relatives) working in the national Parliament. He therefore decided to open his own graphic design company Sai Arts, and his business from the mid to late 90’ was strong. Commissions included painting murals in the capital, furnishing offices to give them a “PNG look,” and designing Christmas cards and calendars that were distributed by national companies, including Air Niugini and Chevron Oil Niugini (Rosi 2002). These favorable circumstances then changed and business ceased.

In 2000, when I visited Santana in Port Moresby, his business had fallen off sharply due to government budget cuts caused by a deepening national recession. Since most of his projects - including his commission to design the Prime Minister’s 2000 Christmas card - came through his wantoks working in the Parliament House, he was fearful that this patronage would also end if the next election brought in a new administration. When this happened in 2002, the loss of income, further devaluation of the kina, and eviction from his house for failure to pay rent convinced Santana and his wife that living in Port Moresby was no longer tenable. In 2002, he moved his family to Madang where he could draw support from his maternal relatives and, he believed, re-start his career.

After living in Madang for eight years, Santana’s professional and personal life remains a struggle to maintain his exposure as a national artist and to support his family. When he first arrived and failed to find work as a graphic designer, he eked out a living selling screen-printed T-shirts at the market and drawings to tourists. To attend school his children moved in with relatives and he built a one-room house for his wife and himself in one of Madang’s squatter settlements. In 2003, Santana’s national reputation secured him a job teaching visual arts at Tusbab High School, and he retained this position until 2007. The salary was small but it provided two benefits: a small house, and an outside studio where he could create large paintings to sell to corporate and expatriate clients securing funds for his children’s tertiary education. [5] In 2008, when World Vision offered him a better salary and housing as a field officer, he resigned from Tusbab High School. While he has enjoyed working with craftsmen living in remote bush villages, the constant travel has left no time for painting. When his contract expires in 2010, he plans to return to Madang and work as an independent artist.

As discussed next, connections between art and life are evident in Santana.’s repertoire as his paintings image old and new life ways, which are familiar to Papua New Guineans but are also contentious. In this respect, his gaze brackets contemporary PNG culture as a melding of Melanesian ancestral heritage with collective aspirations for modernization - including its conflicts. In discourses about national development, a key metaphor for shared experience grounded in local traditions is “Unity in Diversity”. Now widely promoted, this slogan encourages people, including artists like Santana, to draw inspiration from their own cultural traditions but also to recognize that respecting diversity does not preclude common denominators for making national culture, including framing a collective history and posing questions about the future (Iamo and Simet 1998; Mel 2002).

Narratives of the Nation and Ideas of Time

To some degree all nations re-imagine cultural traditions to assert pride in traditional heritage as the cultural foundation on which the nation should develop (Keesing and Tonkinson 1982, Lindstrom and White 1994, Foster 1995, Mathews 2000). Papua New Guinea is no exception. Indigenous traditions have often been devalued by Christian missionaries and their converts as belonging to an age of darkness, but the ideal of honoring ancestral ways (pasin bilong tambuna) is nevertheless enshrined in the national constitution. The same ideal is also emblazoned for all to see on the gabled facade of the national Parliament House, with its roof shaped as a traditional arrowhead flying into the future (Rosi 1991). At the same time, national leaders have also cautioned that hegemonic forces of western colonialism have threatened the country’s ancestral heritage, leaving native people in the perilous condition of losing the sustaining force of their culture and the essence of their identity (Somare 1979b).

To halt this officially proclaimed legacy of loss, the PNG Government passed the Cultural Development Act in 1974. This established a National Cultural Council whose task was to oversee, preserve, and revitalize traditional customs by encouraging dynamic new forms of creativity. Papua New Guineans, including artists, have responded to this directive in two ways: by recording and rearticulating indigenous cultural traditions as vital resources for contemporary culture making (Narokobi 1983, Iamo and Simet 1998), and by linking ideas of national identity to notions of time, which people talk about as: taim bipo (the mythic past of sacred origins, customs and histories that existed before western contact); taim bilong masta (the colonial period with its destruction of traditional ways and instigation of modernity); taim nau (the present with its hybrid life styles, cultural tensions, and goals of national development); and taim behain (the future with its alternative possibilities). Boundaries of these time periods are nevertheless fluid; the past envelops the present and the present engages the future (Foster 1995, Powell 1987, Mel 2002).

Santana’s artworks similarly mingle concepts of time, creating a narrative of national life that frames ideas of the past, present, and future. But unlike the West where movement ahead is equated with progress, Santana depicts the past as ahead of the present and future.

<< Page 2 of 4 >>

 1 2 3 4 

Source: Article excerpt from: Pacific Island Artists: Navigating the Global Art World, Edited by Karen Stevenson