" Guttin Muttin " Print

Like a master weaver creating a great historical tapestry for the court of a great king, Gordon Solomon is an artist whose thread is pure color, and whose loom is the paintbrush. Like those tapestry-weavers of old, Mr. Solomon’s work depicts great battles; but they are the gentler battles of people struggling to find their place in a world which buffets them, while maintaining dignity and love in their hearts. They are universal stories which have been told across the whole world since time began, but they echo and resonate in Mr. Solomon’s paintings within the theatre of the Cayman Islands, the land Mr. Solomon knows, belongs to, and loves. Born and raised in George Town, Grand Cayman in 1977, Mr. Solomon’s art- language is composed of a vast reservoir of word-pictures, taken from the things he has seen all around him; in towns and by the sea, boats and everyday life. Ordinary people engaged in often extraordinary trials, soothed and made sacred by the power of brush and paint. “The love of art and the desire to create has ever been present,” he said, talking about the passion which has always driven him to create. But there has always been a chasm between artisan and artist, and soon Mr Solomon’s true artistic spirit began to emerge and become recognized by others. In 1999 Mr. Solomon exhibited his mixed media oil and pastel works as part of the Cayman- based Native Sons group. One of Gordon's paintings shows an Ethiopian Orthodox Priests who keep the most sacred thing in the world – the Ark of the Covenant, hidden away from sight. But unlike those Ethiopian priests whose calling is to keep the most sacred thing in the world, the Ark of the Covenant, hidden from sight, Mr. Solomon’s calling is, in its way, harder to fulfil. He is one of Cayman’s Artist-Priests, who, using the sacraments of paint and brush, is able to render things in common sight sacred.