painter

Omari Ra has maintained the ‘enfant terrible ‘ image acquired at the Jamaica School of Art, even though it is nearly twenty years since he graduated. Back then, he was known to his fellow students as ‘African’ a pseudonym perfectly suited to his black separatist concerns and his image as radical painter. His reputation stuck because he seemed so perfectly suited as a leader of Jamaica’s younger artists who matured in the shadows of party-political intrigues, ghetto wars and dancehall. In the 1980s, when ‘African’ changed his name to ‘Omari Ra’, a handful of his friends adopted similar names: evidence of his influence.

In his earliest years at the Jamaica School of Art, Kalfani Ra’s work was viewed as radical and progressive.  In those days  ‘Dougy’ (as he was then called) had a reputation for  being unconventional and  for constantly challenging  his peers and tutors.  His approach found sympathy with fellow-students like Omari Ra, Stanford Watson and Valentine Fairclough who were experimenting not only with the formal concepts of painting but also with the whole thought structure that underpinned Western notions of art and life.  Together they developed new approaches to painting and a black world-view  that has become central to Kalfani Ra’s  experimental work.  

This ‘ mind shift’ did not come through a seamless progression of ideas and actions. Rather, the artist’s work has been through a number of changes that like his names ‘Makandal Dada’ and finally ‘Kalfani Ra’ reflected his rebirth as a painter and the development of his black consciousness. Central to this process of maturation was Kalfani Ra’s participation in an international Triangle Workshop that allowed him to visit Zimbabwe and gather first hand experience of life in Africa.Kalfani Ra’s paintings executed with a hard edged, graphic cartoon style reflect his interest in agit-prop and advertising. Despite his use of signs and symbols his paintings like ‘reggae’s message music’ are heavily politicised and readily deciphered. They are concerned with post-colonial black societies and their survival outside of American hegemony. Often they are hard-hitting and scathing in their judgment of Jamaican society and its alienating life styles. But conversely, there is a concern and empathy with Jamaica’s disenfranchised masses that makes even Kalfani Ra’s most sensationalised work, poignant and poetic.

David Pottinger was one of Jamaica’s pioneer painters. His interest in art dated back to the days when volunteer art classes were held at the Institute of Jamaica for the sake of developing artists with a Jamaican vision. In the seventy-odd years that he painted his commitment to the painting of genre scenes and nationalist vision has never faltered.

Essentially self-taught, David ‘Jack’ Pottinger began his career as a sign painter. From the outset, he was a man of the streets dedicating his painting to the vagaries of life in Kingston. He captured the city in all its moods, as has been described in the citation to mark his gold medal laureate status: “If  Huie is the landscapist of the Nationalist Movement par excellence, then Pottinger can be defined as his urban counterpart. A self-portrait or two, a handful of landscapes usually drawn from the outskirts of Kingston, a few still-lifes, and fewer still religious paintings aside, Pottinger’s life-work has been devoted to a single prescribed subject, but a subject of myriad possibilities; the streets and lanes, the sidewalks, buildings and backyards of Old Kingston and the parade of walking, jostling, cart-pushing, higglering, swaying-to-the-spirit neighbours that move, squat, lounge, hawk, haggle on the byways and the the old city where he was born and continues to make his home. This prescribed subject, and consistency and quality of his vision are principal characteristics of his art”.

Stylistically Pottinger was equally consistent and his oeuvre was characterised by very clear distinguishable phases. His early works were marked by realism and naturalistic representation of light. But by the 1960s they were distinguished by the  darker tones of his palette and a melancholy contemplation of the realities of life in the poorer areas of Kingston. In later decades, his work would shift once again to a more vibrant use of colour and energetic brushwork, only to return to a sombre mood in later life. Throughout these different phases, his mannered depiction of the people of Kingston remained the same; attenuated faceless figures, dark and Giacometti-like, stand tall alongside their oppressive, urban surroundings. All this has made Pottinger one of Jamaica’s national treasures, and his art is sought out by many who remember Kingston with a sense of nostalgia. His works have become a record of a lifestyle that is all too quickly passing. PA-S

Ebony G. Patterson is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts who is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY. While still a students she gained a great deal of attention for her bold paintings that focused on female genitalia. Since 2002 she has participated in several shows including Taboo a small group exhibition that she curated. She has been the recipient of several awards. In 2006 she was awarded the Prime Minister's Youth Awards for Excellence in Arts and Culture. The highest award that a young person can receive in this field in Jamaica.

Discussing her work she says: Beauty, gender, body and the grotesque are on going discussion in my work. I am enthralled by the repulsive, the bizarre and the objectness of bodies and the contradictions that both have to art historically and culturally. The Jamaican vernacular, gendered cultural symbolisms and stereotypes serve as a platform for these discussions. I am enthused by words, conditions and experiences that objectify and abjectify.

Menstrual documents, cuts, bruises , language, feminine excrement, peeled skins, bleached skins, decadence, nippled and vulvic forms, the feminine , disease, feminine motifs, and accents are reoccurring images within my work. I seek to reference beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed.

Ebony's most recent exhibition is Gangstas, Disciplez and Doiley Boyz a show dominated by portraits of young Jamaican men who bleach their skin, pluck their eyebrows and wear 'bling' jewellery in defiance of racial and sexual stereotypes. Ebony finds beauty in their psychic violence glamourizing them with glittered halos and luscious lipstick.Through these paintings she questions why young black men, especially those related to Jamaica's dance hall culture, are regularly viewed in terms of aggression. She re-balances this male macho personna with feminine touches and homo-erotica.

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 

Eugene Palmer is a man caught between two cultures and his paintings reflect this dichotomy. Despite the fact that he paints with all the deftness and technical skills of a thoroughly trained artist, the content of his paintings belie the Western tradition. He is repainting history, mimicking the Old Masters and usurping their models in order to claim or reclaim the presence of the black within a 'grand tradition' of narrative painting and portraiture.

His most recent paintings employ Eugene's own family members juxtaposed with landscapes which might easily be scenarios from another century. These figures and vistas are thrown up against each other in such awkward ways that they poignantly question the relationship of blacks to a European Tradition in painting and life generally. Yet Eugene's ability to provoke such issues within his work was not always so acute.

His career has been one of recovering both a personal and 'collective' history and this 'sense of balance' is a recent accomplishment. The painterly poise which he now demonstrates comes from years of yo-yoing between style and subject matter, attempting to find forms which could best explore and express his identity. Such issues of identity are central to Eugene's work. He manages to express visually all the questioning and uncertainty that is an intimate part of the immigrant experience. Since coming to England as a teenager at the beginning of the 60's, Eugene's task has been one of assimilating the host culture, while not relinquishing his identity as a 'Blackman'. However, to speak of Eugene in terms of nationality and culture, whether Jamaican or African, is difficult, since nearly thirty years in England has stamped him with all the positive attributes of a chameleon-like personality, which sits comfortably with the 'post modern' eclectic nature of his work.

In this context, his imagery, for all its petulant broodiness is perfectly 'reasonable', where contradictions become the norm. There is an element of the pathetic about Eugene's painting of blacks which defies his own tendency toward 'heroising'. His blacks, while dominating, the canvas are also constrained by it. With heads or feet cropped to suit the scale, their bodies militate against confinement and hover in an ambivalent manner which suggests both a coming and going. It is their sense of instability, that, 'the center cannot hold', which truly pushes Eugene's work into the arena of a new kind of grand narrative, 'an other story'.

The success of Eugene Palmer's paintings is not based merely on the use of compositional and technical devices. The sense of ownership in these paintings is strong; Eugene's laboring and nurturing is immediately apparent. His method of working, which includes numerous working drawings, sketching, 'painting-drawing', displacement and replacement of objects, and the constant perusal and perfection of his figures, all militate against his natural facility for painting. Eugene is also fascinated with paint itself; its texture, luminosity, density. Beyond his imagery, he sets himself tasks which challenge his understanding of the medium and further ensure that the act of painting can never become slick or complacent. The restless and fragmented nature of his subject matter, combined with Eugene's painterly style which is constantly reinventing itself, creates images which are difficult and problematic for the viewer who knows no better. Yet others will glance at his work and experience automatic recognition tinged with both joy and sorrow.

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

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.

Coming from fairly humble beginnings, Eugene Hyde was born in Cooper’s Hill, Portland and raised by his mother Ivy Larman, stepfather and grandmother. His father John Hyde, had died when he was a boy, but it is possible that it was from his father - a photographer - that Hyde nurtured an early desire to become a commercial artist. After his father’s death in 1944, the family moved to Spanish Town where Eugene attended Beckford and Smith’s (now St Jago High School).

Hyde began his career in advertising as a graphic apprentice at Art and Publicity Company in Kingston but after five years he decided to travel and study. He completed his first degree in Advertising Design at the Art Center, Los Angeles, California and having won a scholarship, he went on to complete his Masters at the Los Angeles County Institute. It was here that Hyde came under the influence of Rico Lebrun a graphic artist, painter, sculptor, teacher and writer who was an incisive force on West Coast artists of the 1940s and 50s. The effect of Lebrun’s influence registered immediatly in the quality of Hyde’s drawing and more latterly in his drawing-painting technique that was to be a distinctive feature of his work.

Hyde returned to Jamaica in the 1960s, initially as Art Director with his old firm Art and Publicity, however he would soon leave to establish his own company and extend himself into other areas of the fine arts, teaching private classes, lecturing at the Jamaica School of Art, exhibiting and co-founding the Contemporary Artists Association, along with the like-minded dynamic artists Karl Parboosingh and Barrington Watson. Unlike his partners, Eugene Hyde was a quiet systematic worker, but he too held a strong commitment to encouraging modern approaches to painting in Jamaica, It was through his efforts that a number of internationally famous artists exhibited at the CAA including Roger Bruinekool, Richard Gorman Powers and Erwin de Vries. Hyde was also the first artist to thoroughly develop the idea of working in series: his Flora, Sunflower, Spathodia and Crotons series all executed between 1969 and 1973 introduced this concept and brought him public recognition. Choosing familiar flowers and colours he pushed his examination of their forms to abstraction. It was an approach that more conservative local viewers were able to understand that helped an appreciation of modern art principles in Jamaica. Hyde would later follow his flora studies with other successful series including Colour is a Personal Thing and Casualties both executed in 1978, shortly before his death in 1980. PA-S