Helen Lieros is one of
Zimbabwe’s fines painter and is amongst its most enthusiastic teachers of art.
Seven years ago the then Editor of Gallery . Barbara Murray, interviewed her
and asked if her youthful admiration of Oskar Kokoschka was in any way related
to the expressive turmoil of her own painting.
Maybe that’s the Greek
part of me coming out. Probably the drama. I feel that the biggest thing in my
life is to try and be an individual and try and identify who I really am. It is
a battle in my life, in my work, this identity. Am I Greek? Am I African? And
yet there is a link in the superstitions accepted as a Greek or as a white
African I feel that this has been really my biggest fight.
Helen Lieros was born in
Gweru, the capital of Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province, in 1940. Sixteen years
earlier, her merchant seaman father had been shipwrecked off Cape Town; during
the wait for a replacement vessel to take him home to the Greek island of
Serifos, he accepted the invitation of an old friend to visit Rhodesia. As
Helen Lieros recounts it, “He came here , and that was it. He went back and
said to his captain “ I want to be paid out; I don’t want to carry on. “ And
that’s how he came to be here. He had travelled all over the world, and was
always looking for a country where he wasn’t an alien.”
Her mother’s route south
was equally unlikely. Like Lieros’s father, she was an orphan, and she was
brought up by her grandmother.
My mother was in Greek
drama school, in her final year. It wasn’t the thing in those days of a girl of
good family to go to ancient Greek drama school: she worked out a system with
her best friend, so that everyone thought she was going to the gym, and in the
meantime she was studying drama.
In keeping with her
spirited nature , and through a contact made by a relative, she began corresponding
with her with her castaway compatriot in Rhodesia. “ You’re an orphan, and I’m
an orphan,” he wrote,” come and marry me!”
Gweru was probably more
touched than most Rhodesian towns be the events of World War Two with pilots
from Europe and Australia joining local men at the airbases of Moffat and
Thornhill. “Although we weren’t directly involved,” Lieros recalls, “this whole
cloud hung around us.”
If the active engagement
of Africa in a distant European war was on reminder of the bizarre geopolitics of
the colonial world, the issue of language was another .Gweru sits squarely
between the Ndebele and Shona speaking parts of the country and by the middle
of the century more and more people were speaking English as second or third
language. And in the Lieros household?
Life was Gweru, and life
was Greek. At home we never ever spoke any other ;language except Greek. It was the first language
I learnt; I was not allowed to speak one word of English. I didn’t know any
English, to be quite honest, until I was six years old, it was very hard for me
to go to kindergarten, but I had a wonderful teacher, who was my mother’s best
friend, and mine, and she taught me to speak English. But at home it was Greek.
Unlike today, there was
no Greek school in the country: and certainly not in Gweru. Lieros attended
Chaplin High School, where the headmaster at the time was a classicist. If the
mild, intra-European racism of the times intruded on the young Helen’s life ( “it
was a British colony after all, and many times we were referred to as “ the
bloody Greeks”), he reinforced the message of her mother, that she cam “from a
history of culture”. “ my mother used to say that when Greece was building the
Parthenon, the British were still cannibals.”
Notwithstanding its “history
of culture”, the Greek community ad a general disdain for girls’ education.
Lieros and her younger sister, Mary, learnt much from their mother about
classical drama, literature and philosophy, and at Chaplain School she focused
her early creative energies on music, rather than painting.
I played the piano. Mostly
musicians I didn’t like. Because of the speed of my fingers, I was pumped wit
Bach. I hate Bach to this day. I always wanted to write music, but I knew my
limitations. Then all of a sudden . when I was about fifteen. Art came into my
life, and I found that I could express myself that way. And there was a link
with music – because even when I was working with music. The sounds were
colours. I was fascinated. If I played
something that I really loved, it was full of colours, and of the things that
sere happening within me as a young girl.
In an academic sense ,
music continued ins dominance through to the end of her school days, at which
time she battled with her father over what was to follow. He wanted her to
study music in South Africa 9 it was at his insistence that she had taken
Afrikaans as a second language at school): she was determined to study art. “
Then my father wrote to his cousin in Greece , who happens to have studied
architecture in Launanne, and he writes back and says that there’s a wonderful
art school in Geneva”.
Lieros was in Geneva for
1958 to 1962
It was beautiful. It got
rid of all my hang-ups, my complexes. There were no ethnic differences. I couldn’t
speak the language at the beginning, but there was integrity about everything,
I can’t tell you even arriving there with little white socks, when everybody
was wearing stocking and pantyhose! It was like another world, and the
discovery of that was magnificent.
In the first year you do
everything, especially drawing. We did design, sculpture and painting, and I was very close to the sculpture. I
liked the sculpture element, you know, and of course they were working with
granite. I had a fantastic doyen and I asked him, “ Do you think I should go
and major in sculpture?” and he said, ‘No, you’re a painter I’ve seen your
works. “So I decided to go into painting. The history of art was the worst, because
of the language. I didn’t mix with English
speaking people. I refused to mix with English speaking people. So the barrier
of the language was strong.
And the painting?
I was painting what they
wanted me to paint, and I had to use the colours they wanted me to use, the
Swiss’ colours: the greys, the beige's, If I would use red ( which I was dying
to do) they would make me cross- hatch grey over it, to subdue it, it was a very formal kind of education. And the lecturers
hated each other so that you went into one class and he opposed the other ones,
You had to somehow change your identity to please the professor.
Armed with her degree,
and a scholarship awarded by the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ( Roy
Welensky’s personal interest in the young Rhodesian art student was one of his
last acts as Prime Minister before the Federation was dissolved). Lieros
proceeded to Florence for a year. Her main area of study was fresco painting:
not the fresco secco, which is painted on dry plaster , but the true, buon
fresco, perfected in 16th century Italy, in which the pigment is
applied to damp plaster and becomes integrated into the structure of the wall
itself. As in Geneva , there was a tendency
for students to have to parrot their teachers’ views, rather than develop their
own, and several month of study fell victim to strikes ( The Christian
Democrats were on strike. The Fascisti
were on strike. The Comministi were on strike so we lost out”), but the
galleries and palaces of the city offered rich recompense.
Lieros returned to
Rhodesia in 1964, at her mother’s request.
I came home. I came back
to Gweru. I had no job. I was exhausted, disillusioned. What was I going to do?
I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a painter. I remember Geoffrey Atkins interviewing
me on television; I had a wonderful rapport with him, and asked, “ Do you think
I could work here at the television studio, doing murals? And he said, “forget
about it, you’re an artist. Why don’t you consider teaching?” I went back to my
headmaster at Chaplin. “Sir you know, I was
thinking, maybe I should go into teaching and get back to the school? “
He was delighted. Sp a door opened for me. But it was an alien thing, trying to
teach it was like discovering and working out something again. On the sideline I
was still paining. Even when I’d given them something to do, I would walk to my
little easel on the side and work away,
and then walk around again. I think that rapport, that the teacher was painting
as well, made it interesting for the kids.
After three years of
teaching, Lieros married and moved to Harare with her husband, Derek Huggins ( “
He was a gentleman. He loved literature. There was something in him that I had
not found in other people…” She was offered, and accepted, a commission from
the Greek Archbishop to paint some murals in his church. Her father was already
living and working in Harare , and her mother joined him as soon as Mary
finished her schooling in Gweru.
The mid sixties ushered
a heightened sense of tension into the country, and saw the proclamation of Ian
Smiths Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Looking back, Lieros claims that
, “I never was really political”, but the strength of the values she absorbed
from her upbringing and her experience suggest otherwise.
Why, she wondered during
her teaching days at Chaplin, did the students have to learn French and
Afrikaans, when they should have concentrated ( in the nineteen-sixties, of all
times) on Shona, Ndebele and Karanga? Living , as she effectively did, in the
medium of a second language herself, her ideology was totally different from
that which prevailed at the time.
Her childhood, it’s true,
was marked by the consciousness of national differences, but it wasn’t in any
way scarred by them. The cosmopolitan years in Geneva left a different sort f
mark: “ the race thing, of being a Greek or Spanish or black American or
whatever else was there , there was nothing in of that, I never sensed it. And when
I came home, there was this sort of discovery of what was going on, which did
not really please me.”
After completing the
Church commission, and after taking Derek on an introductory trip to
continental Europe, Lieros returned to teaching, in private schools and
colleges and in her own studio. “I didn’t want to go back to the government system
of education. I tried to break away from the formula that was stuck on me when I
was a student in Geneva and in Italy. I wanted individuals to be able to
express themselves. To find out what
each student want, what kind of field, whether graphics or design or painting
or sculpture. You had more rapport that way, and at the same time you discover
yourself. I was intrigued with the situation. I discovered Zimbabwe all over
again. I discovered those colours that they were suppressing and they were
killing when I was trying to use them as a student in Geneva. They all became alive,
this wonderful continent of reds and blues and all the colours that I was trying
to use all these years. All the elements of my childhood returned with the
discovery of the colour, and the space. But I battled. I battled for about ten
years to really identify with myself. Also, I blessed sanctions. We couldn’t
get paper. We couldn’t get canvas. We had to improvise materials: we had to
find new ways in order to paint. We were joining paper, that’s when we started
doing collage. My sister’s husband, Peter, started making oil paints. There was
a unity amongst the artists. We shared everything. There was a determination to
explore whatever was available. I think, literary, it was 1974 when I become an
artist, in other words that’s when I discovered something. It was, again, because
of improvising. I feel that this was so important, to discover Africa. My
subjects were all about Africa and the war; it was very politically oriented in
a symbolic way. The late 1970s were absorbed by teaching, painting, the
cultivation of artistic links, and tending to young roots of Gallery Delta,
which Derek Huggins had opening in 1975. Then, in 1980, came Independence. I was
very optimistic. I felt that the change had to be, I felt that justice had to
prevail , And I must admit that I was proud of being here, the way it happened.
I was pleased that there were no extremities. I hate extremes of any sort,
whether this site or that side. Everything was taking its course. A lot of
doors opened for the artists, overseas, whereas before we were under sanctions.
There was a focus. It was around that time, or just before, when the young black
painters made their mark. They’d been around before then – Charles Fernandes, Thomas
Mu, Kingsley Sambo – but they were pushed to one side b all the attention on
sculpture, and I felt that was very
unfair.
