Petrine Archer [.com]

Art from the Heart, the second exhibition from Kingston's newest gallery has provoked some discussion about the art market and the gumption it takes to run an art business now.

DecorVIII opened late last year and its new show, Art from the Heart, (both phonetic puns intended) celebrates love and Valentine's Day. Situated in a small business enclave in an increasingly commercial but chic part of Kingston, DecorVIII is well appointed for uptown viewers seeking new trends and Art from the Heart offers a mixed bag, sometimes reflecting the sentimental tastes of the McDonald family team who run the gallery. The exhibition's Sunday morning opening with live music and good wine, was reminiscent of the nineties, an era when Jamaica's economy was buoyant and collectors had more disposable income to buy both good and bad art. The art market has dwindled since, even as it has become more competitive and sophisticated. With resources scarce, art lovers are becoming more discriminating about what they view and ultimately what they buy.

Perhaps because of these harder times, the McDonald's have been able to garner consignments, with stock from pioneer artists such as Alexander Cooper to younger talents such as Nakazzi Hutchinson (shown here), all keen for visibility given fewer opportunities to exhibit. DecorVIII's good natured owners are also enthusiastic about using their space to feature the work of up-and-coming artists, so they are showing pieces by those who have yet to find favour with the art world cognoscenti.

Art from the Heart reflects the McDonald's altruistic intentions and the exhibition's title is a gesture to their own passion and their eclectic approach. It remains to be seen if they also have the heart to weather the competitive nature of the business, the critical appraisal of their venture, and the risks of a shrinking market in these recessionary times.

Just when most Caribbean artists and institutions have started to congratulate themselves for establishing their presence on the internet, the technological landscape is shifting again. Recently, the Jamaican based digital agency Panmedia launched the first mobile app custom designed to provide exhibition news and listings for Blackberry phone users. The free app pushes information already available on their Art Events Jamaica to mobile phones in a form that is user friendly. So does this mean that artists are going to have to rethink how they package their work for viewers online? Perhaps. Whereas displaying work on a website allows for the use of high resolution images, stories and extensive cataloguing, many Jamaicans spend more time browsing their phones rather than their desktop computers. Artists will need to consider ways to make their work zing on hand-held devices like ipads, iphones and Blackberry phones.  This may call for mobile apps with more stunning images, sound bytes and only the critical information that can capture the attention of audiences increasingly on the move.

Barrington Watson's Retrospective currently showing at the National Gallery of Jamaica and two annex sites at the Olympia and the Bank of Jamaica, is the largest endeavor devoted to the work of a single artist that the NGJ has ever undertaken. With more than 250 works including paintings, drawings and prints, the retrospective traces the development and fruition of Watson's oeuvre, also documented in a 192 page colour-illustrated catalogue providing scholarly essays and supporting material. The huge crowd that attended the opening, confirmed that this show will be a 'blockbuster', a term rarely required in the Jamaican art scene since few exhibitions here ever achieve that scale or level of popularity.

The Jamaican public's unwavering admiration of Barrington Watson's art since he first returned to Jamaica in the 1961, on the cusp of Jamaica's Independence from British rule, tells us a great deal about our passion for art and also about our inherently conservative taste. Watson's academic approach applied to history-painting, portraiture, landscapes and still-life, found favour with a local viewing public at a time when other modern artists including our own Karl Parboosingh were abandoning traditional methods and approaches to painting for more conceptual models that suited ideas of liberation and the free thinking 1960s. Instead, Jamaican audiences were satisfied to celebrate Watson's essentially representational imagery that reinforced rather than challenged romanticized notions of ourselves. Beginning with Ignacy Ecker, our first professional art writer, reviews promoted Watson as a master painter par excellence with very little critical judgement of his work.

This retrospective displaying Watson's paintings over more than 50 years provides an opportunity to finally critically engage with this artist's work; its nationalist ideology, its bourgeois values and its artistic strengths and weaknesses, at a time when the country is itself embarking on a year of celebration and a process of introspection.

This season's exhibitions, craft fairs, antique shows and xmas sales have left me questioning notions of value, especially around art and gift giving. In today's market place, where so much of what we buy is convenient and disposable, its tempting to buy gifts that are empty of significance. We lose sight of what true gifts represent and disengage ourselves from the process of giving, by choosing presents that are depersonalized and banal. Giving art militates against this sense of alienataion. Quality materials, precision workmanship, durability and inherent ideas help to distinguish art from dross. The next time you're tempted to buy trinkets or tinsel, remember that gift giving is a magical act of reciprocity that obliges us to another. Giving art serves to reinforce the social contract that bonds ourselves to others – giving art shows that we still care.

Caribbean Art World's recent decision to suspend the print version of its magazine in favour of its virtual publication and social network site, and the launch of two new Caribbean digital magazines ARC and Caribbean Intransit this year, underscores the efficiencies of online publishing.  ARC maintains both an on and offline version but increasingly, the web is becoming the space of choice for creating quality designed art publications that inexpensively communicate  to wider audiences. In the real world (and especially the less affluent Caribbean), the production of these lavishly designed magazines would be a complex and costly exercise, but online it seems anything is possible. Here, all three magazines can offer stunning high resolution photography and rich production values that make them a joy to browse.  Of course, one misses the sensory experience of feeling the weight and sheen of their paper stock, but their visual stimuli is satisfying. Ultimately however, what will keep these magazines in demand, whether in their digital or hard form, is the quality of their content. Hopefully, the standards set in their initial issues will be maintained.

The Indian High Commission to Jamaica celebrated the 150th birth anniversary of the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore with an evening of reflection and dance recently.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) or Gurudev was a creative genius who excelled in many areas of Indian life including literature, fine art, music and dance reorienting the nation's cultural landscape away from colonial dependence towards nationhood and political autonomy. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European Nobel Laureate, he was knighted by King George the Vth of England in 1915 and when he died in August 1941 he was lauded not only for his artistic achievements but also his role as a goodwill ambassador throughout the world.

The anniversary programme honoured Tagore's life by taking a brief look at his poetry, drama, dance and fine art, with readings, a scene from one of his plays, a video podcast about his art, and a creative Manipuri dance ballet titled Chitra performed by Priti Patel and the Anjika group, currently touring the Caribbean.

Rabindranath Tagore's genius is still relatively little known outside of India. But the evening served to educate even as it entertained. Find out more about Tagore's art. Click here to watch the video.

Oddities is in exhibition selected by Amaicraft gallery owner Herman van Asbroeck that displays his interest in strange and wonderful objects. It is an ecclectic range of expressionist paintings, historical prints, tribal masks, contemporary photographs and disarming curios that speaks to this collector's essentially modernist sensibility. Walking through the warm red upper rooms of his small framing business in Kingston and experiencing the juxtaposition of works by 19th century printmaker Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849), the late painter Milton George (1939-2008), intuitive Albert Artwell (b.1942 ) or the Cuban Roberto Fabelo (b.1951) brings to mind the connoisseurship of Parisian collectors such as Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) or poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1919) whose financial support and intellect provided the backdrop to that city's avant-garde movement. Oddities' strange and wonderful marriage of objects, with Caribbean art at its core, demonstrates Herman van Asbroeck's discerning taste but also the extent to which this region's art deserves to be part of a larger story about western art and modernism. 

A new documentary film Amos Ferguson: Match me if you can, featuring the life and work of Bahamian self-taught artist Amos Ferguson, previews at the 8th Annual Bahamas International Film Festival next month in Nassau. It's the third film by the director/producer duo Karen Arthur and Thomas Neuwirth that explores local art; the first two being  Artists of the Bahamas (2010) and Brent Malone: Father of Bahamian Art (2011) which both received accolades. This I hour video uses historical footage of the artist in interviews and at work in his studio with supporting testimonials from a host of Bahamian art-world celebrities, to flesh the artist's incredible oeuvre. The footage is fresh, informative and evocative, giving the viewer a very real sense of life in pre- and post-independence Bahamas and this artist's struggle to overcome adversity through his art. Most compelling are the paintings themselves that steal the show and beg the question as to why more documentary films of this nature are not being made throughout the region to capture the images and insights of pioneer painters like Amos. Sneak a peak preview below.

An exhibition exploring the Myths, Beliefs, Religions and Imagination in the Caribbean is on show in Martinique's Regional Council building in Fort de France this month. Organized by the Director of Culture Reneé-Paul Yung-Hing  , the multi-media display brings together contemporary work from the English, French and Spanish speaking islands including Cuba's Manuel Mendive, Martnique's Patricia Donatien-Yssa, Haiti's Eduard Duval Carrié, Trinidad's Leroy Clarke, Barbados' Ras Akyem and Ras Ishi and Jamaica's Albert Chong. Creating any exhibition that crosses language barriers and geographical boundaries is a major task especially when its works and artists are forced to navigate airline hubs such as Miami and San Juan, but the shows language of myth and spirituality is a forceful one that speaks more to the region's spiritual commonalities rather than its differences.

The human form features prominently in the art on show. The ritualized body whether stripped naked in Ras Akyem's drawings, bio-morphised in the paintings of Mendive, or costumed with bric-a-brac in the assemblages of Duval Carrie (shown here), demonstrates how as a result of slavery, the region's dispossessed peoples harnessed their inner resources to create intimate sites of worship that could speak to other worlds and realities. Whether inspired by Vodou, Revival, Rastafari or Santaria, the art works in Myths, Beliefs, Religions and Imagination in the Caribbean show how the enshrined body becomes the altar where our people display inner wealth and offerings, to praise and appease their gods.

Princeton University's collection of photographs related to the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 was the highlight of the National Library of Jamaica's Distinguished Lecture recently. Even though the talk was intended to focus on works already in the national archive, it was easy to see why UWI lecturer Clinton Hutton might have been seduced by this rare album. Acquired in 2009, the collection of 165 albumen photos documented by Julie Mellby details the horrific events of 1865 when more than 500 were slain on both sides of the post-slavery revolt. Portraits of military commanders, victims, rebel leaders and even the maroons who aided the British in suppressing the rebellion, all figure in the album thought to have been owned by Alexander Dudgeon Gulland, a surgeon in the British Army. The lecture underscored the popularity of these types of images in the 19th century when photography served to illustrate overseas incidents in ways that might be the equivalent of today's cable television news. But the prevalence of photographs such as Colonal Fyfe and the Maroons shown here, which allowed for reconstruction of events to meet the demands of faraway audiences, also underscores how technology can be manipulated to re-stage history, and that seeing is not always believing...