Realism
The rapid growth of the tourism and financial sectors resulted in substantial immigration, which began to transform the social and cultural profile of the Cayman Islands. By the early 1980s there was an influx of expatriate artists and art teachers, whose work was to influence the local art scene. There were also increasing opportunities for exhibiting work spearheaded by groups like the Visual Arts Society and the emergence of the first commercial galleries. This decade was dominated by realist painters, newly arrived to the Island, who sought to capture the picturesque local landscape — a choice driven as much by the strong demand for representational art as by a genuine desire to portray the remarkable light and colours of the “The Islands Time Forgot.” A notable exception during these years was Caymanian-born artist Bendel Hydes, who began to experiment with a range of artistic styles — including Pop Art, Surrealism and abstraction — as early as the mid-1970s. However, as the first Caymanian to pursue a fine arts degree overseas, Hydes was undoubtedly something of an anomaly, and the artist’s relocation to New York in the early 1980s largely removed his influence from the Islands’ nascent art scene for the rest of the decade. Hydes would subsequently return to Cayman with much greater frequency in the 1990s, inspiring the next generation of artists and the emergence of a distinct genre of “Caymanian Modernism”.
