MARLON WATERMAN’s only child is Abrianna and she is nine years old.
If there was just one lesson he could teach her, it would be that success in life means discovering the capacity within yourself, and working with courage and dedication towards expressing it as best as you can. Unfortunately, nobody told him this and it would take almost two decades for him to come to that realisation.
Waterman is a professional carver. He can carve magnificent, unique and intricate works of art from anything. Whether it is fruit, vegetables, ice, wood, wax or sand, after he uses his carving knife or, as he prefers to call it, his magic wand, one is sure to be left in awe.
However, before this past Lodge School boy established Kreative Karvers full time in 2013, there weren’t many people who saw what he did as a business.
In fact, even though in the past two years he has demonstrated the potential gains to de derived from his niche, Waterman was of the belief that many people still saw his mission as impossible.
“A lot of people tell me I should be working in a hotel. I should do this, I should do that but why work in one hotel when I can work in all? Because this is where I want to carry [my business], the whole West Coast, the whole South Coast and every parish. I can do everybody’s buffet,” he quipped.
At his St Barnabas, St Michael home, Waterman demonstrated his skills at preparing a fruit basket for one of his customers. He got under way by sanitising his quartz countertop, then set aside his tools and the fruits to be used.
“So where’s the basket?” he was asked.
And without hesitation, a watermelon appeared on the counter. He took a sharp tool and, using calligraphy, proceeded to carve “Happy Anniversary Lynda” into the fruit. He made some other detailed and beautiful markings and transformed the watermelon into the basket that would be a receptacle for the other fruits.
It took him nearly 45 minutes to complete, and all the while he was explaining how he reached this point.
It all started 19 years earlier when Peter Skeete, a community officer at the Haynesville Community Centre, approached him about attending a wood-carving course through the community outreach programme.
The 40-year-old recalled that he jumped at the opportunity because when he was 12 years old, his mother, Maureen Griffith, was gifted a cat sculpted from solid mahogany and he thought it was the coolest thing ever.
With the guidance of his teacher, Marlon “Ilon” Skeete, after the 12-week course was over, Waterman, who was a novice before, graduated top of the class and was awarded Most Outstanding Participant in the northern section.
He may have wanted to continue carving but “reality” hit that he also had to make a living, and in 1997 he learnt cookery at the PomMarine Institute.
“At that time carving wasn’t a real money earner so I liked cooking and my mother sent me to do the cooking course. I started in October but all that time I was still milling around with carving.
“I used to go to school, learn to cook, then come home on evenings and carve little pendants and masks and give them to Ilon so when he go out selling on Saturdays, he would carry mine out too. He would sometimes come back when some were sold and give me a little $130, $150, $160 . . . and that was how it continued.”
Waterman kept on at cooking school and did his art on the side until the following year.
With a smile, he recounted that there was a culinary competition to mark the end of the hotel school year in 1998. Bigwigs from all over attended, including then Acting Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and they watched in amazement as an ice sculptor chiselled an eagle taking a fish out of water in the ice.
“When the man done, the whole place was silent. You could have heard a fly flapping in the wind. And I shouted, ‘The next time I come up here it will be to learn that’. The whole place erupt but that time I serious as a judge to myself,” he said.
After he took a shot in the dark and quit a hotel job, lo and behold, in 1999 PomMarine offered food carving as a pilot course. Waterman borrowed the $750 it cost from his aunt Gloria Waterman and sister Sancia Griffith, and after the three months were completed, he was again the top student.
Still this didn’t confirm to him that he could quite possibly earn a living in this art because out of the blue, he cut off his dreadlocks and joined the Barbados Defence Force. His mother was sick so Waterman had to get a secure salary.
He served six years in the military, where he became known for his carving skills before he decided to leave.
His talents then took him to Canada where he would get a “wake-up call” – from an Indian guy known as Areef.
“He asked me, ‘Are you crazy? What are you doing in a kitchen working? People like you are rare’.
“He told me to make a promise that I would pursue this carving thing; that when I go home I was not going to go back in anybody’s kitchen working like that. ‘Any time at all you go in somebody’s kitchen, it is to carve and leave’,” Areef had said.
With a young child to support, Waterman broke his promise when he came home in 2012 to take a job in a kitchen. But as if by fate, he was laid off just months later and decided to make carving official.
Now he can boast of doing work for the owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich; American actress Vanessa Williams, Machel Montano’s One Love show, and a couple of newlyweds in New York at their wedding last month, among a host of other clients.
He teaches carving at Grantley Prescod Memorial Primary School on Saturdays, with a percentage of the earnings going back to the school, “because I want to give the students a better opportunity to see that art is something you can live on”.
He added: “Teaching is one of the things I want to get into so as to open up little ones to carving. Doing for others what people didn’t do for me. Entertainers, doctors, lawyers, these are professions that people look at and say, ‘You’ve made it’.
“That is why they would want to follow in those professions but a lot of people don’t look at artists and say that because there aren’t any examples,” he said. It was for this reason he turned down an opportunity to migrate to Canada.
“I can’t leave because the people that I trying to inspire won’t have an example to aspire to. Barbados is a desert for artists. There are super-talented artists in Barbados but they don’t get the time of day.
“There are carvers in the world – I ain’t telling you I am the best – but there aren’t many people who can carve anything. If people would stop measuring success by what other people say it is – the big house, the Mercedes Benz – then people would know more about the power of self and self-belief.
“A teacher, like an artist, isn’t seen as successful because she doesn’t work for big money. But her success is doing what she wanted to do from the time she was in primary school and if she had to, she would do it for free.
“It is about loving what you are doing and pursuing it to the end. It took me a while to learn this, but better late than never,” he proclaimed. (SDB Media)