Jamaican artist

Seya’s simple style reflects a search for truth and purity. This has led her away from subjects in the material world towards a form of abstract painting inspired by thought rather than image. Her interest in painting came from her love of poetry and and her relationship with Jamaican husband Parboosingh. Her quiet temperament and spiritual fortitude must have been the perfect compliment to Karl Parboosingh’s largesse, but coming from a protected merchant class family environment in Allentown, Pensylvania, she could hardly match his bohemianism. They met in New York’s Greenwich Village at a poetry reading. Parboosingh was then  developing his reputation as the enfant terrible of the Jamaican art scene. He had worked in Europe as a modern painter, reportedly studying with artists like Roualt and Leger. In New York, he was something of an exile; a struggling as an artist with no studio. Within the first few days of meeting him she decided she would provide him with a space to paint in her apartment. Instead, he moved in completely.  After a year or two, they decided to marry and live in Jamaica.  

Parboosingh’s decision to live in Jamaica meant that Seya was uprooted from her strong family base and brought to live with Jamaican neighbours and friends who were equally sceptical of the marraige. Nevertheless, Seya was steadfast in her loyalty to Parboosingh, believing that God had brought them together because of their different experiences in life. He had a need that she could fullfil and she needed to learn about the extent to which she could reach out, as well as understand her role as a healer.Seya began painting at Parboosingh’s invitation. Although she had painted during their marriage, it had always been surreptitious and secondary to his work. When Parboosingh asked her to paint and to exhibit her work alongside him in the late 1950s, she saw this as his recognition and respect for what she was doing.

On canvas, their styles were as dissimilar as their temperaments. Parboosingh’s paintings were bold, hard-edged statements about Jamaican society, whereas Seya’s works were placid, gentle glimpses into a quieter world of solitude. Similarly, in real life Parboosingh was in the limelight at the forefront of the Jamaican modernist movement involving other artists like Eugene Hyde, Barrington Watson and the Guyanese visitor Aubrey Williams, while Seya chose to remain in the shadows, content with the routine of her painting and the work she could do to support her husband. This would be her role until Parboosingh died in 1975.

Seya’s painting was profoundly affected by Parboosingh’s death. Until then, her life work had been autobiographical and absorbed with her relationship with him.  Parboosingh’s death taught her to expand the power of love and healing. She says it was then that she learnt fully that everyone touches everyone in spirit. “You can’t paint without touching a person that one meets in spirit,” says Seya. “ By seeing them in the light you can see them and paint them as whole.’”  The healing she had witnessed in Parboosingh was to become her calling after his death. She still lives and works in Jamaica, and her paintings are about keeping that communication and healing alive.

PA-S Extracted and edited from Archer-Straw “ Seya Parboosingh: Painting a Love”  in Caribbean Beat, May-June, Port of Spain, Trinidad 2000

Something of a prodigy, Karl Parboosingh’s paintings reveal his rare and gifted talents as a painter. Examination of his background however shows that whatever artistic skills he may have been born with, they were enhanced during his lifetime by  solid training and exposure to art. During his younger years he had the rare opportunity (at least, for Jamaican painters) to work alongside some of the masters of the international modern art movement in such cities as  Paris, New York and Mexico and this undoubtedly supported his success.

Born in 1923 in Hopewell, St. Mary, to Mr. and Mrs. Vivien Coy, Parboosingh was originally baptized Karl Coy. And as a teenager, he was educated as Calabar and Wolmer's Boy's School. It is possible that he inherited some of his artist's skills and eye for design from his mother Gladys Coy who was a dress designer. When in the 1940’s she moved to New York to establish a dress making business there, Parboosingh followed. These were the years that witnessed the beginning of the Second World War, and Parboosingh as a young man, joined the forces and saw active service in war torn Europe. 

It was only on his return to New York after the war that Parboosingh began his career as an artist in earnest, enrolling at the New York Arts Students League. But Parboosingh was a restless spirit and Greenwich Village, New York could not support his interests completely. Anxious to experience more of the art world he set off for Paris and spent the next few years traveling, studying and working extensively in the main art centres of Europe.  In Paris, he studied at the Ecole de Beaux de Paris and reportedly in the atelier of vanguard artist Fernand Leger. He is also said to have studied with the expressionist, George Grosz, French painter and stained glass designer, Georges Rouault at the Centre d'Art Paris, and in Mexico - with Alfaro Siqueiros. As a result, Parboosingh adopted modern approaches to his work, becoming Jamaica’s first artist to truly experiment with avant-garde styles. Despite his leanings towards simplified flat surfaces in the manner of Henri Matisse, Parboosingh’s temperament was too tempestuous to create similarly minimalist paintings. Soon his smooth edged forms would give way to rougher more crudely drawn images that were somehow more in keeping with the social shifts in Jamaican society.  By the time he returned to Jamaica in the late 1950’s his paintings were bursting with an energy more reflective of expressionism. This was the style that would dominate his paintings until his death in 1975. It was also the style that was most indicative of this artist’s life that was always edgy, experimental and full of excess. PA-S 

From an early age Morrison sketched incessantly, covering family books with figure drawings. By the time she reached her teens she was certain that she wanted to be an artist. Art satisfied an obsession that she had not yet clearly defined but had welcomed wholly.School teachers advised that she seek higher education. At McMaster University in Canada, and later, at Howard University in Washington D.C., she specialized in painting, but later developed an interest in sculpture.

Returning to Jamaica in 1976, Morrison taught for a year and found it ‘draining’. She stayed at home for ten months simply considering her next move. She did nothing, and people kept asking her what was wrong. A job in television at the Agency for Public Information presented new options for refining her politics. This was during the era of Jamaica’s experiment with democratic socialism, and she thrived in such an environment, with all its robust ideas. The pressured nature of television production and constant interaction with the public further built her confidence. She now faced the world with a little less hesitancy.

Morrison is a very private person. Aspects of her life shared with family and friends can only be made public through her art. She is adamant that her work should speak for her, remaining wary of the written word. She often uses that art to work through her problems. Her sculptures are metaphors for her body and her psyche. They also reveal her optimism and faith in healing. Harmony, balance and wholeness are central to her assemblages even though they are constructed from fragmented and disparate elements. She revels in the act of welding them together. It is as though she is reworking some of the more painful and disjointed moments of her life to give them positive meaning.Morrison is one of few artists in Jamaica working on large constructions and installations that are as commanding conceptually as they are physically daunting. Yes, she’s a small person – under five feet - but she is drawn to making larger than life, totem-like sculptures. Typically she is drawn to forms that challenge her physical capabilities. Overcoming constraint is a silent challenge in her life, and the sheer size of her work suggests she meets it well.

Morrison is a scavenger. Before any piece of work can begin, she hunts for suitable materials, her hand and eye drawing her to forms for her massive assemblages. Heavy metal, large wooden beams, car-parts, metal sheets from appliances such as fridges and stoves and other found objects are combined. She blends then into minimalist constructions that defy the term ‘junk sculpture’. More recently her work has become even more pared down invloving photographs, X Rays and collaged compositions that coolly and clinically bring her life and beliefs under scrutiny.PA-S

Extracted and amended from ARCHER-STRAW, P. A Pilgrims Progress, CARIBBEAN BEAT Port of Spain, 1999, p.32

Born in Kingston to a well-to-do family, Moody left Jamaica at aged 23, initially to pursue a career in dentistry. This was not necessarily his first choice, he was already widely read in Chinese and Indian metaphysics and showed an aptitude for the arts. While still a student he visited the British Museum and was so affected by the Egyptian and Asian collections there that he taught himself to carve. By the time he had completed his dental studies in 1930, he had also become a proficient artist creating significant works such as Wohin (1934; Sacramento, CA, Adolf Loeb priv. co.), and Johanaan (1935; London, Tate).

These gigantic heads are archaised forms that pay homage to Eastern philosophy rather than Greek classicism. They communicated an idealised and universal understanding of man’s origins that went against the grain of fascist tendencies already apparent in prewar Europe. The success of these pieces and his first exhibition in Europe encouraged Moody to move to Paris where he stayed until the outbreak of the war when he was forced to flee the German occupation. After a hazardous journey across the Pyranees into Spain, he made it back to London in 1941 stricken with pleuracy that would plague him for the rest of his life.

Moody's wartime experiences and and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima would have a lasting effect on his work as he explored the frailty of mankind and man’s need for spiritual development. His postwar figures such as Three Heads (wood, 1946), although retaining their characteristic stillness also reflected his loss of innocence and concern for the fate of modern man. Moody’s ability to select and work with wood, releasing the movement and tensions of their grain have meant that his large heads have aged with dignity cracking and fracturing in ways that give even greater appeal, profundity and vulnerability as they mature.

Moody’s sentiments towards the Caribbean appear more positive. In 1964 he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the University of The West Indies. His metal sculpture Savacou (cast aluminium, h. 2.13 m) is a symbolic bird that harks back to Taino traditions intended to create pride in the Caribbean tradition and hope for New World civilization.

Moody died in England in 1985, but his sculpture and contribution to the arts in that country has gained greater visibility, championed by his niece Cynthia Moody. His work can now be found in important collections such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate, London as well as the National Gallery of Jamaica.

© PA-S

David Miller Jnr’s relationship with his father David Miller Jnr was crucial to his development as and artists, and it is rare that one is mentioned without the other, despite their stylistic differences. David Miller was apprenticed to his father in their carpentry business established on Bray Street of Windward Rd. They regularly did trades work for the house building business, but when that was slow, they wood create carvings for sale to the tourists that normally docked at Kingston Harbour. They did not sell directly to the public but instead used a middle man. In this way, they were insulated from the more commercial aspects of tourism trade, rarely dealing with the public and pricing of their work. When visitors did come to their workshop, the pair never haggled over prices but instead placed their work on display in a showcase that visitors were free to select from or leave. This is how they maintained their dignity as craftsmen and artists.

It is said that the family were Jehovah’s Witnesses but nothing in that spiritual tradition prepares the viewer for their images that seem to balk against Old Testament cautions against the creation of graven images. The Millers were adamant that their images were not idols but based on their faith and this is born out by the sense of reverence with which they treat the human form. In particular David Miller Jnr’s heads are a testament to racial dignity and bring a sense nobility to the depiction of black people during that time. Creating oversized heads with exaggerated racial features that were normally smoothly finished and highly polished, the craftsmanship in his pieces transcend carvings produced as souvenirs today. In fact, the distinctiveness of his imagery as well as their mysterious symbolism, such as horns and sacred markings suggest that these images were deliberately intended to communicate ideas about black divinity that paralleled the messages of  Garveyism and later Rastafarianism.

David Miller Jnr's death just eight years after his father’s suggests the empathy that existed within their partnership. It was a working relationship that had lasted more than sixty years and when it ended, they took with them an understanding of these works forever lost to the contemporary viewer.PA-S

Its unusual to speak about David Miller, the father without also mentioning his son of the same name. As carpenters and curio craftsmen they worked together, initially with David the son being an apprentice too his father. Regularly exhibited together, their works are conceptually similar, but stylistically very different.

Initially, the Millers created carvings for Jamaica’s growing tourist industry. They operated a workshop on Bray Street off Windwards Rd where in addition to making their furniture and when house-building was slow, they also made curious that bore their signatures and a typical reference to Jamaica W.I.

It is easy to see how the Millers were the predecessors the craftsmen of today’s flourishing souvenir trade that caters to tourists on the north coast. Once their carvings were discovered by the art world and very quickly elevated to the status of sculpture, even though they themselves continued to refer to them as carvings. Examined closely however, there is nothing kitch or commercialized about David Miller Snr’s carvings and even though his titles of works such as Talisman or Fetish  or Demon have been read as an attempt to exoticise his images for the sake of sales, it is more likely that they refer to are an honest expression of his spiritual beliefs that tap into developing ideas of race, spirituality and identity at that time. Certainly, Miller Snr himself tells us that his first sculpture of a Rasta was created out of his curiosity at the new phenomenon when he first encountered a rastaman at the Institute of Jamaica. Ironically, meeting David Miller in person was similarly like an encounter with a biblical figure as Robert Verity recalls. “…Very often ‘Pops’ who had the face, the presence and the resounding  voice of an Old Testament patriarch would pause in his chipping away at a piece of wood to propound their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses and to explain the fine distinction between carving and a graven image…These men spent their lives working with integrity and serene dignity – turning wood into beauty and enriching the lives of those who came to know them and their work”. (The Intuitive Eye exh. cat. , National Gallery of Jamaica, 1979)David Miller Snr’s long white beard characterized him as a spiritual figure and something of a mystic, and it is this same sense of cosmic understanding that attends his work. Many of his works bear symbols such as the rose, lily, intricate patterning, and symbolic writing that suggest his wide intellect and exposure to mystical thought. His was a fertile imagination and even though his techniques were somewhat cruder than his son’s, his works are more varied in form and content. They suggest an understanding of the cosmos yet to be explored.PA-S

Born in rural St Thomas, McLaren went as far as the 6th grade in primary school, then left to take up an apprenticeship in coach building. At the turn of the century this would have been a viable profession but with the introduction of the motor car after the 1920’s McLaren’s skills became redundant.

For the next few years he did casual work but then returned to farming on his father’s land in St Thomas. His interest in painting developed out of a need to do more and he surprised himself, family and his neighbours with his own talent. In the years to come he would enter fine arts painting and drawing competitions with increasing success, finally coming to the attention of the Institute of Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica who encouraged him to exhibit.

Unlike so many of Jamaica’s self taught artists, McLaren is more of a folk painter than a visionary. His work is not guided by any need to communicate spiritual or mystical belief, instead he is interested in the simple depiction of everyday life. Here, the term ‘naïve’ or ‘haptic’ might be an apt nomenclature for his talents. Subject matter is rendered in almost childlike simplicity, but the thinking behind each work is far from immature. Often the messages within his works are simple affirmations such as “Life is what one makes of it”…the statement that underlines his favorite of many self portraits.

As an alternative to formal training, McLaren developed his own techniques for resolving compositional problems of colour, form and distance in his work. Dark outlines are used to distinguish one form from another, colour is often applied straight from the tube, and although perspective is employed, compositional relationships are rarely accurate. But none of this matters in the face of McLaren’s objective, which is to render what he sees in detail. And, as if to compensate the viewer, McLaren fills his work with minutae that is both an aid to understanding and also entertaining. In this way, his works take on an important documentary quality showing us aspects of life in a Jamaica that has changed significantly. The Jamaica, that McLaren depicts is sealed in time and harks back to an era when downtown was orderly (Parade Square, 1970), when white gentlemen and women waltzed in each others arms, and when black people only attended their balls as musicians and waiters (Dancing in the Ballroom, 1978). PA-S

Marriot was born into an artistic family, his mother was a musician and writer while his father made and sold straw items. From an early age, encouraged to explore his own creativity, he developed an interest in wood and earned his earliest commissions when he was still a teenager. After completing school, he apprenticed as a furniture maker. His skills gained him employment locally working with Art Deco furniture designer Burnett Webster executing custom furniture, and then abroad, first as a carpenter in Panama, and later as a farm worker in USA. By the 1940’s, he was featured in local newspapers as an enterprising sculptor: and while in America he presented a bust of then President F.D. Roosevelt, to the White House.

Essentially self-taught, Marriot gained the opportunity to study art formally when he won a British Council scholarship to London. At the Camberwell School of Art, he developed his talents as a sculptor more methodically, adopting the classical style for which he would become renowned. While in London he also worked in the furniture trade but continued to promote himself as a sculptor, even carving a mahogany tray as a wedding gift for Queen Elizabeth.

Marriott returned to Jamaica on the eve of its independence when there was a great deal of interest in replacing colonial European forms with art that better represented a Jamaican aesthetic. Marriot’s talents were immediately commissioned to create busts of all of Jamaica’s recently selected national heroes such as Marcus Garvey and Norman Washington Manley, as well as to create monumental sculptures such as that of Jamaica’s Olympic sprinter Arthur Wint, outside the newly built national stadium. Marriott’s skills were unerring; his talent for capturing the likeness of his sitters whether in wood, clay or bronze made him a popular choice for public commissions. Marriot also became a respected teacher offering his services as a tutor in sculpture to the Jamaica School of Art.

During the 1980s, Marriot contracted Parkinson’s Disease an illness characterized by involuntary shaking that limited his work. Even so, when there was public outcry over the first monument created to commemorate Bob Marley, Marriot was commissioned to sculpt another. His life size figure that depicts Marley, the reggae star in a staid but nevertheless assured representational manner, now stands in Celebrity Park as a testament to the talents of the singer as well Marriot’s skills.

Born in Yorkshire England, Edna Manley’s mother was Jamaican, from the prominent Shearer family. In 1936 she met her cousin Norman Manley who had come to England as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. He was later conscripted and fought in WW1, while Edna studied at St Martin’s School of Art. They married in 1922 and moved to Jamaica where Edna was to pursue her career as a sculptor creating images that reflected Jamaica’s struggle for nationhood. During the 1930’s Edna Manley continued to exhibit in London but increasingly her focus was Jamaica where she exhibited and supported the development of the arts.

Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused (1935) aptly reflects her stylistic and social interests during that era. Hewn intentionally from dark mahogany, its naked black torso supports a head thrust upwards in search of a new dawn. Stylistically, Negro Aroused is linked to William Blake’s romantic imagery of a renovated or resurrected man (Boxer, 1990), but conceptually it wrestles with edenic and primordial thinking closer to the primitivists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Yet, in spite of its idealism, Negro Aroused is a constrained and even pained figure. Even without chains, its movement is frustrated by its rooted akimbo posture, suggesting that the black man’s future is not born out of freedom but an irrevocable recognition of place. Norman Manley considering how the black man might triumph over this adversity wrote:

“...There is a tremendous difference between living in a place and belonging to it and feeling that your own life and destiny is irrevocably bound up in the life and destiny of that place. It is that spirit which is the most hopeful thing in Jamaica today. It is that spirit which alone encourages the development of our national consciousness...”

Sculptures such as Negro Aroused (1936) became icons for this era and much of the work that she created in the run up to Jamaica’s independence such as Into the Sun (1954), Growth (1958) and I Saw My Land (1960) featuring the same heroic black figure, bear this weight of representing the nation’s vision.

Her message promoted black self-dignity, but never at the expense of personal and autobiographical details. The Moses images from the 1950s suggest how her personal and public life were entwined once her husband Norman Manley became Jamaica’s Chief Minister. Edna Manley’s images of the prophet Moses bear strong resemblance to her husband Norman, while the narrative imagery of works like I Saw My Land (1960) boldly signal his role as deliverer of the nation. The designation ‘Moses’ was an appropriate one in a society that saw itself as being freed from bondage and colonialism and set on a path for Independence. As part of her efforts to support the national development Edna taught art classes and helped to establish the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts (1950) through which she influenced later generations of artists. Her husband became Chief Minister of Jamaica in 1954 and although he lost the national elections in 1961, he was instrumental in leading Jamaica to Independence in 1962. Norman Manley died in 1969, but was succeeded by their son Michael who became Prime Minister in 1972. Edna continued to play an active role in cultural development as a founder member of the National Gallery of Jamaica and as one of the countries foremost artists winning numerous awards and national commissions and sculpting an enormous body of work, right up until her death at age 85.

Judy Ann MacMillan is one of Jamaica’s foremost academic painters. Born in Kingston but trained in Scotland she brings to her work a unique synthesis of technical ability and subjective intimacy that only a Caribbean artist can achieve.

Returning from her studies in Europe, in the early 1970s Judy MacMillan began to establish a name for herself amongst collectors and patrons alike as she undertook a series of portrait commissions. Her keen sense of observation, classical rendering and her sense of pathos for her sitters brought her public acclaim and success. But Macmillan showed herself to be more than just a society painter, in the tradition of itinerants such as the British painter Augustus John who visited Jamaica in the late 1930s, she moved towards portraiture with a social conscience. Choosing subjects such as Jamaica’s youth as in New Breed 1975, she raised questions and awareness about modern Jamaican society. These works quickly found their way into the National Collection.

Throughout the 1980s Macmillan veered towards landscape painting creating large moody panoramas that diligently and sometimes sentimentally documented rural scenes from the Jamaican countryside. Dividing her time between Kingston and her country home she increasingly displayed her interest in the simpler timeless aspects of Jamaican life. Again this genre was greeted with success and these works were avidly sought for banks and corporate collections.

MacMillan’s style is romantic, she paints with a quixotic manner that enables her to relate to Jamaica’s changing vista’s and temperaments. She revels in these different moods, capturing the breeze as it moves across the landscape, the shifting forms of clouds, the vagaries of light from dawn till dusk. All become sources of inspiration for her work. Similarly with her sitters she is able to employ colour, light and shadow to characterize the complexities of the Jamaican persona.

More recently, MacMillan has brought her oeuvre together in a publication of her work entitled My Jamaica that displays her talents. It also demonstrates her commitment to the island in a way that is sentimental and at times nostalgic.