Michael Sloley/Freelance Photographer
"Jamaica is my home" - Gilou Bouer.Avia Ustanny, Freelance Writer
GILOU BOUER, after 31 years of living in Jamaica, still exudes French chic.
A trim, minimalist dresser, she wears very little make-up and there is nothing to hide an innate sense of style.
She speaks with the merest trace of the French accent today. Her speech is bejewelled with Jamaicanisms.
Again and again, she will express herself in the way only an islander would. The gesturing hands, however, are 100 per cent Gallic.
"I would like to make a difference to the art scene here," Gilou states. She is the Curator of the Mutual Gallery in Kingston, but really a woman of mystery except to her closest friends. Get closer, however, and an irrepressible joie de vivre emerges. The mischievous child, born just after the second world war in Westphalia, Germany to French parents, still lives in her heart.
Today, a mild probe reveals the artistic sensibilities which have given Gilou her a purpose in life and have been used to guide the lives of others, here in Jamaica.
The Mutual Gallery, her domain, is coolly air-conditioned, a temple to fine Jamaican art in the midst of the philistine city. A wealth of expression is on display.
"I can understand when people say they want to spend a little time here, walk around in the grandeur of it all and then go back to work. I look at the different ways people express themselves and find it so inspiring," she opines.
Jamaicans who visit the gallery on a regular basis will receive a total education on art and an introduction to names new and old, internationally known and locally esteemed in the art world. They will also be sure to discover the work of new artists.
Later, Gilou will state that it has been her delight and mission to raise the general level of artistic consciousness among the people. Here is art not just for connoisseurs, but for those whose minds are open to its mysteries.
On the gallery walls this day, white walls are the backdrop for a photography exhibition. The current exhibition, she says, has been mounted so that photography will be recognised locally as an art in as much the same way as water colour is.
"There are different expressions of photography, too," she adds. What she is doing has been done before, but the agenda is still urgent.
All is silent, except when Gilou breaks periodic reverie to speak. She has come a long way from home.
Just after the war, her family lived in a large home in an area of France that was still German, but it was a time of happiness, endless days of playing in the garden which Papa, a production expert employed to the military, spent much of his spare time in. The factory administrators oversaw from chemical factories to shoes.
Papa's garden. Fruits, vegetables, a rose garden. A poultry yard and beehives. He also cultivated snails as well. The memories of Gilou's childhood are as clearly etched as a water colour freshly painted.
A spreading darkness is the memory of her father's sudden death, near to retirement. He died of a clot in the heart.
"It was devastating. It happened so suddenly." Thirty years older than his young wife, he had been looking forward to retiring in the South of France with his family.
She cried, realising how much they needed her, now that her husband was gone. All four children were immediately moved to Alsace in France, a beautiful small village of wild flower-filled fields. There, mother was determined to start again.
"Living without a father, because we moved, we did not feel it as much," Gilou remembers. But, later, the missing came back. "Today, I find it very difficult to go to a funeral. It is not even being frightened to death. It is just knowing that someone is not there. It is in that sense that I miss him."
Her mother did get married again, but Gilou did not really like her stepfather very much. "It was because of how I knew my father. I found it difficult to understand my mother."
Gilou was sent to boarding school in Alsace and there she was to remain until she completed her studies, and fled the strictures of Alsace and home for gay Paris searching for herself, as she remembers it.
Boarding school had been a melting pot, made up of boys and girls born of parents of different nationalities. It was a cloistered world whose values were buttressed by those of her mother at home. Neither in home nor school were they encouraged to speak the patois of Alsace.
She rebelled.
"In high school, I was a real devil," Gilou recalls. "I was always playing pranks. I continually got punishment for naughtiness and put in detention. Several times I was prevented from going home on weekends. I really gained a reputation for being difficult." Remembering these times, she says, "I thought I was happy then, having fun."
Throughout the years at school, she was looking forward to living in Paris.
"Growing up, my idea was to go towards the big city, to leave the provincial smallness of Alsace behind."
When, after boarding school, a friend invited her to Paris, she departed with graceless haste. Of course her mother was not pleased. Gilou never returned to Alsace.
"I was determined to stay (in Paris) determined to find a job."
This determination and perhaps, precipitate action was to mark many stages in Gilou's life, as dissatisfaction with the state of affairs occurred.
But, back then, in Paris, she admits, "I did not think of a career. I did not know what I really wanted to do." She had, with direction from her mother, studied secretarial procedures, going as far as she could up to sixth form and there was no further to go. She found herself not wanting to take up this profession. "I was without any goal, I was searching for myself," Gilou states.
The Parisian cafe was the headquarters where she and a large group of friends frequently met. From the cafe, they would go to the movies or off to dance. "Someone would get invited to a party and the whole group would try to get invited too."
The cafe scene was heaven after Alsace, but soon it started to pall. Free spirited Gilou began to resent the dictatorship of mass culture.
"You had to do everything in a group, and if you saw a movie which most people liked, you had to like it." Her individuality was being stifled.
After four years, she knew that she wanted to leave Paris. Then one day, she read an article about culture in Britain, describing the theatre scene and the great democracy of expression there.
"What really struck me was that the article said that the middle class lived side by side with the working class and there was a great acceptance of both. I saw it as a freer society."
In 15 short months spent in the UK she met her husband to be David Forest, who took her to Jamaica in 1971 when he secured a job there.
Jamaica promised to be a big adventure for the young, French migrant.
"It would be the furthest I ever went," she recalls. She was pleasantly surprised to find that Jamaica was so developed, but soon had to assert her usual independence in making her way around Kingston, as their new associates insisted on warning them away from the streets. Gilou was on her way to discovering the true heart of the island, solo.
"I decided I would live a normal life. Now, I go out and meet the artists, Downtown, in Seaview, in Trench Town... I find people very helpful on the streets. It is not helpful to frighten people when you come from a different country. The French woman first taught French at Hillell academy and the Alliance Francaise then, her husband suggested one day - why don't you take O'levels in English, responding to her expressed wish to continue to learn the English Language. That was the beginning of many successful courses and, for the first time, Gilou was able to see herself as able to break away from the secretarial course on which her mother had set her. Two years at the Edna Manley school of Art were followed a first degree in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
"I felt International Relations would give me a good background."
While at University, she parted company with David Foster, but, by then had so deepened her roots here, that she felt able to accept a job at the French embassy and continue living here. She was to remain 12 years at the embassy, but even during those years she was still searching for her purpose in life. "There was just yearning for something else." her destiny was to work with artists and manage a gallery, but the thought was not even in her mind then.
It was one day when a French friend said to her that she wanted to open a shop in Montego Bay, that Gilou opened her mouth and said, "What I would like to do is to open a gallery in Montego Bay."
Today, she reflects, "it just came out of my mouth, but I felt that it was someone tapping me on my shoulder and saying, 'hey, where's your direction?'"
Her subconscious answered and, immediately, she sat down and pondered what she had said, and what it would really take to make the thought become a reality.
Gilou said, 'yes' to her spirit guide and then proceeded to spend a lot of time viewing exhibitions, getting to know artists and talking with sculptor Gene Pearson, then a neighbour.
Today, she reveals a profound passion for the world of art, then just-discovered.
Gilou visited Montego Bay to see what was available in terms of gallery space and, little by little (it took about a year) the Bay Gallery was born.
Located on Gloucester Avenue - the tourist strip, she was able to earn foreign exchange. The venture made its contribution to the art scene, until Gilou's vision outstripped her reality - again.
In Monetgo Bay, always aware of the international scene, she began to believe that it was an urgent necessity to create international exchanges of art with other countries. "Art is international. It is something that you share as widely as possible."
Montego Bay she recalls was becoming a bit restrictive in this sense.
Gilou visited Berlin in Germany and Mexico City where she confirmed her belief that many artists would be happy to exhibit their work in Jamaica. But, only, Kingston, she felt, could be the centre of such an exchange.
The Bay Gallery was closed after eight years and Gilou worked from home as a private consultant, organising exhibitions in hotels and elsewhere. When she heard that Pat Ramsay, of the Mutual Life Gallery, was about to retire after 15 years, she applied and secured the job of managing the gallery there. She has been at this gallery for the last five years.
Now, the photographic exhibition is the latest of her brainwaves. When in Montego Bay, she had tried to create combined exhibitions of artists from both ends of the island. In Kingston, creativity has been deeply tested.
"You have to renew yourself. I think its important," she reflects.
Bouer's personal mandate is to come up with different shows which are not just for the sake of selling, but really about appreciating art for what it is. I prefer to sell when someone likes what they see and appreciates it from an artistic point of view," she says.
She still has the dream of taking art beyond Jamaica and the galleries here. The Artist of the Year ranking established by her gallery is intended to do just this. With this concept, the search is pursued among artists under 40 years old for outstanding work. The artist found is recognised and given various incentives. The hope is to have these artists shown abroad soon.
Gilou is still intent on organising exchanges between different countries, but that is a project which the gallery cannot do alone, she says. Sponsorship and financing, is needed.
"It really helps for art to be known outside of Jamaica. It adds more value to our collection here. It gives our artists the possibility of going somewhere with their work."
Gilou no longer strains to find inspiration, and her nomadic days are long over. Her beautiful blue eyes are penetratingly direct as she reflects - "This island is my home. You know - you have all your friends and you are used to the environment. Jamaica is my immediate home. That is one reason. The other reason is that I do not really have a home elsewhere." The family home is no longer in France. Her mother now lives in the United States, one brother and a sister in France and one sister in Germany.
Here, she is at home in her own space, and happy. She states with satisfaction,
"I used to walk around my huge home and say I prefer to be rich and unhappy than poor and happy, yet, when I opened my gallery and my income was tremendously reduced, I did not think about being unhappy anymore.
"There is the beautiful satisfaction of doing what you like and also doing it in the belief that you have been chosen to do it."
