Most artists debut in a joint show at one of the local galleries, but imagine debuting your art in this year's prestigious Bacardi Biennial.

Well that's the case for Miles Manders, who is a well known saxophonist and flute player on the local music scene, but very few know him as an artist. In his quiet time, however, he executes beautiful creations.

He is featuring four works in this Biennial – pen and ink works entitled 'The Rose and the Tear', 'Charlie the Great', 'Legends of Jazz' and 'The Flautist' – which officially opens to the public today.

Mr. Manders said he was in his third year of high school at Berkeley Institute that he discovered the arts. Once his loves took hold, all he wanted to do was study art and music. His teachers would tell the janitor not to chase him from the building, but just to lock up after him. But Mr. Manders would encounter a few stumbling blocks on his road to having his artwork exhibited and appreciated.

While at the school he led one of the first boycotts there. "The aim was to get Black studies into the curriculum," he remembered. "We were going to boycott the first Interschool Sports in order to protest that. They fought against it and I learned a lot because my whole governing body at Berkeley was UBP.

"All the elite middle classed Blacks who were successful or upwardly mobile, were UBP, and these were the Black people who were supposedly promoting Black people, but not Black empowerment.

"It was a very critical period and the influences came out in my art, but it wasn't acceptable at that time."

After graduating, he decided that he would continue his training as an artist. He went to a well known art school but had a less than positive experience which hampered his confidence about showing his work.

"I originally started out to be a bona fide artist and I went down the trail and I was accepted in an art school and all of that," he said. "It was in the late 70s. It was in Cleveland, Ohio, although I won't mention the name, it was one of the prestigious schools. I was there for two semesters and my instructor kept (physically) tearing up my work, and I guessed he was trying to say, 'don't be possessive about your pieces', but he wasn't tearing up anybody else's work.

"I didn't particularly take note initially, but I was the only black student in all of my classes and then other students started noticing that this guy was picking on me.

"I just wanted to get through and then I couldn't take it anymore and I left. He kind of put a damper on my psyche about showing my art off and I felt that it wasn't good enough.

Instead Mr. Manders went to Berklee College of Music where he found a new channel for his generous talents and a different atmosphere.

"I was one of the first black students at the Berklee College of Music, because they had just integrated and their jazz programme had just became renowned," he said. "They had people like Quincy Jones and all these so-called names who had never graduated, but who had come through Berklee.

"But there were very few blacks enrolled in the school and I was the only one in all my classes, but this was okay because I had some pretty cool instructors. I was on the Dean's list for three years at Berklee and after my first year, they approached me to teach."

The money from teaching was helpful for his tuition as he had chosen to attend the school against his parents' wishes.

His father, Cromwell (Mandy Talbot) Manders, was a cousin of the Talbot Brothers and was well aware of the highs and lows of the music business. "(The Talbot Brothers) were the first ones who could enter through the front of the hotels, the others had to come through the kitchen," Mr. Manders said of Bermuda's attitude toward black musicians at that time.

"My father knew what it was like, so he wasn't too favourable about me going that way, I was supposed to be like my great aunt, a pharmacist."

Mr. Manders has found success as a musician, however, and some time to pursue his interest in the visual arts as well. But it was still a long road from finding his initial passion for art and showing for the first time at BNG, a situation which his good friend Ron Lightbourn helped bring to fruition.

In addition to his problems at the Cleveland school, Mr. Manders had a lot of disappointment while trying to get shown in Bermuda as a youngster.

His teacher Charles Lloyd Tucker at Berkeley inspired him and pushed him in his work, but Mr. Manders said his interests in those political times went against the grain of Bermuda's arts scene.

"Charles Lloyd Tucker was my mentor and he encouraged me to persist and to try my hand at it," he said.

"And I don't think that I was very good at it in high school, but he saw something and one thing that I noticed that I do have, was that I can start something and it never quite ends up the way it started.

"So my composition is my strongest suit, whereas when I saw Dali, I was upset because I thought I had discovered that and Salvador Dali (1904-1989) had been doing it for a while.

"So I had to find my own niche and I found it in how I compose my pieces, it is a little bit of surrealism and a little bit of social commentary, especially when promoting the black arts, things that culturally enhance us, that have not been highlighted.

"Everybody can go down to South Shore and see the beaches and flowers, but that never really turned me on, and everybody was painting houses and flowers, but nobody was really painting people.

"It was like, we didn't exist and so I started with people and what we do and spiritual connection to the arts and how important it is.

"But it has been denied and it was almost like cultural genocide, we were led to believe that we either had to be an accountant or a lawyer or some type of other tradesman, but arts was always secondary.

"And even when I was in high school, I tried to submit some of my stuff and we were dealing no less with the Society of Arts and they never took any of my stuff. Mr. Tucker would collect the work and take it, but mine was always brought back and he told me that perhaps my stuff was too political.

"It was the 60s and 70s and I was into the Black Power Movement and over here, that did not fly, they didn't want to hear anything about it and they didn't want to see anything about it, especially paintings."

But he persisted and his debut today marks the end of a long quiet road.

"I look inside to get my inspiration; it is not what is happening outside," said the artist. "Ron hipped me to this, that as soon as you get up just write whatever comes to mind down, and the first part is fluff and after you get past the first 15 minutes or so, it starts to make sense."

Regarding being talented both with his saxophone and his pencil, he said: "No matter what I do – and now I am trying to run both – it becomes artistic. I felt that I had to make a choice, but it is all art, so there really is no choice."

Mr. Manders hopes to expand his mediums in the future.

"I'd like to eventually start painting, as this work at the moment is pen and ink, a black and white series," he said.

"The only reason that I don't paint is because I don't have a place to paint, paints are a little sloppy and it'll be all over my carpet and stuff and I'll have to pack it up, so I found that pen and ink was a little more manageable.

"I like the impact of the black and white, I see colour in black and white, so that is where I am at."