He is a man for all seasons in art, active in all of its branches in The Bahamas. He has directed the famed FinCo Summer Art Workshop, which has set many of our most distinguished younger painters on the path to fullfilling careers in their discipline. He heads the art programme at The College of The Bahamas, the nation's highest educational institution. He directs the prestigious art gallery of the Central Bank of The Bahamas, where the most talked-about exhibitions are held annually in Nassau. There is one more thing that Antonius Roberts is-a fine artist who is constantly in the process of reinventing himself and constantly competing with himself and fellow master artists to expand the boundaries of Bahamian art.

Roberts newest paintings and sculptures, collectively entitled Making the Connection, is his most recent incarnation. It can be summed up in terms of the apparel of a bride: something old, something new, something borrowed and many things ethereally and Bahamian sea-water blue.

In the paintings, the something 'old' is reflected in subject matter and method. First of all, Roberts very sensibly draws on his Bahamian heritage, spinning out in sumptuously toned acrylics scenes and figures from the tales of old fishermen, the superstitions of our people based on the poorly remembered magical/religious rites of our African ancestors, including the obeah bottle-laden trees and other salient features of the landscapes of cherished though impoverished childhood. There are plenty of the comfortable themes-an exquisite treatment of an egret, sunsets, seascapes, a hairbraider and two views of mother and child. And many interpretations, like the canvas Waiting for the Boat, will call up bittersweet and fiercely defended memories for a generation of Bahamians, but all are made new by a highly skilled craftsmanship and an inspired interpretation. Altogether, there is so much of a voluptuous hodgepodge here, those who have the joy of viewing this exhibition will think that a Bahamian Aladdin rubbed an old kerosene lamp and set a fanciful genie to play.

The 'old' is also there in Roberts' return to the exploration of his best gift: strong drawings that derive their beauty from the lyricism of fluid lines. However, a part of the 'new' is that the drawings are not sitting on unpainted paper or canvas or flat paint. They are discovered in a background of idiosyncratic neo-Impressionism/Expressionism, an astonishingly complex pattern of whorls and angles of colour built up, by painstaking application with a masonry tool the artist owns.

In this process, Roberts is returning to, and further refining the technique he used to create his previous but one collection, which contained the marvelous painting "Eve of Redemption". In fact, the title piece of the show, Making the Connection, is highly reminiscent of its predecessor featuring the sweet rottenness of a modern Eden after the fall, with a cigar smoking Adam figure and a buxom, slatternly Eve in communion with the Serpent.

As active as their environments are, the strong drawings, such as that of the mermaid in "A Fisherman's Tale" offer enough narrative line to satisfy those who decry the loose interpretations of modern abstraction, and long for the days when paintings told a story or described a landscape with great exactness and did not require so much participation on the part of the viewer.

Roberts says this of his drawing: "I am realizing that drawing is my strength. I felt the need to draw more, to be more narrative, to crystallize my ideas. People are important to me, so human figures are becoming more dominant.

As always in Roberts' recent work, the blue is everywhere, reflecting the many shades and tones of this heavenly colour that no Bahamian can escape or desires to escape from the moment of birth, as they are the colours of the waters that make up three-quarters of our homeland.

Also among the 'new' are the mahogany and limestone sculptures, which promise well to be snapped up early by collectors with a discerning eye. Here again, the materials and the subject matter are purposeful, entirely native and breathing the textures and the scents of home. The sculptures are particularly beautiful in their recall of the two-dimensional work of Roberts' naivete-the melody, as in Daddy Longlegs being carried by strong, unhesitating line, rather than fancy artifice, which allows errors in concept to be disguised as intentional fretwork.

As for the borrowed Roberts, like all other artists (if they will be honest), is influenced by contemporaries and artists who have gone before. This writer says Matisse sometimes of the drawings and often Gauguin (see Easter Bonnet), and Joseph Stella of the bursts of colour energy. Some will probably say that the frenetic dynamism in the work of Antonius Roberts is akin to that in the Belgian James Ensor's Fall of the Rebel Angels. Solomon says that there is nothing new under the sun-that is true. But, whatever Roberts has borrowed as all artists do, the genius lies in making the sum entirely original and personal.

For Antonius Roberts the reinvention of self is a deliberate process, the in-point being the Flight of the Spirit collection, in which the artist said he once again explored the simplest processes of painting to interpret the subjects of a primordial world-birds and fish, for example, emerging out of whirling dervish applications of paint, rather than pre-dating and being adorned by the paint. Now, apparently, after the sojourn in Eden, the present collection represents the sixth day, the repeopling of Roberts' Bahamas with a little more of the warm flesh and blood of The Bahamas, and a little less of the austere onlooker persona the artist had become for most of Flight of the Spirit.

It is obvious from his conversations that Roberts has been troubled by accusations of a lack of relevance to the Bahamian situation. Doubtless, his work will not be relevant to many modern critics. Bahamian and non Bahamian who insist with muddy justification that art, especially that of third world people, cannot be relevant unless it has the power to reform governments and level the playing field of society. Though to give him his due, Roberts began his career with canvases and works on paper that cried the beloved country, and showed enough of the plight of the old, poor and otherwise dispossessed to bring the most hardened masochist the right measure of emotional pain.

Now, Antonius Roberts has come to brave the prevailing winds of sociopolitical angst to sing the song of his own soul and his own personal take on the world, and to produce beauty for its own worthy sake. He has following precedence. Does anyone truly believe that butterflies had to glitter in quite so many jewel tones in order to pollinate a flower? Did the Bahamian sea have to reflect the blue of the skies and convert them into a zillion uncatalogued shades of that gorgeous hue? It's simply celestial ars gratia artis. And, Antonius has learned the lesson well.