painter

Born in Kingston to Jamaican and Cuban parents Kayiga forsook a white-collar job in favour of studies at the newly formed Jamaica School of Art and Crafts. He majored in graphics but after winning a Government Scholarship pursued a Masters in Fine Art degree at the Royal College of Art, London. On graduating he took a job teaching and doing post-graduate research at Makarere University Uganda and also exhibited there (Kofi Kayiga), Nomo Gallery, 1970 and (Kofi Kayiga and Kefa Sempagni), Uganda Museum, Kampala (1972). Even while in Africa and travelling he continued to exhibit works in Jamaica and London Kofi Kayiga and Aubrey Williams, Sussex University (1971). He has taught fine art in various institutions since 1966. Between 1980 and 1983 he took up an Artist in Residence teaching post at the College of Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. He is currently full professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, MA.

“My work is seemingly random but images form themselves and are recognised from a deeper seemingly unconscious place and out of that I find direction...I consider it an unconscious intelligence, not an intellectual intelligence. And it’s uncanny that a lot of African work comes out of this place. For me this is more authentic and that’s how I paint…”. (Interview with Kofi Kayiga, 2004).

Kayiga’s work is concerned with origins, ‘primitive’ in the sense of exploring the essence of human consciousness and its links with spirituality. To access this deeper understanding of the self, Kofi strips himself of his formal training and approaches his subject matter intuitively and even mystically, recovering images from deepest memory and the subconscious. His is a pantheistic world that reveals the mystery of the universe in every aspect of daily life. Inanimate objects and situations become animate and alive with animal forms, insects and cosmic creatures that remind us that the spirit world is all around us. Unlike the many artists creating during this era who were inspired by the repatriation message of Garvey and Rastafarianism, Kayiga’s world is not one of idealism mediated through the diaspora experience. Instead, he is the only artist who channeled a first hand experience of Africa into his work, resulting in an immediacy and directness that consists of bold strokes, vibrant colour fields and symbolic language.

Kayiga is a prolific artists producing more than 300 paintings per year and his work can be found in private collections world wide and major institutions such as the Museum of the Center of African American Artists, also the site of one of his most significant recent exhibitions now travelling, (Kindred Spirits: Kayiga and Winsome) 2000 to present.

The contradiction in Nakazzi’s work is her desire to move away from materiality towards a greater sense of spirituality, and to do this, she sets up a tension between the object and the space around it. Even as she is constructing her characteristically life size figures, she is simultaneously stripping away their body parts, and representing the body in a fragmentary way that hints at the essence of humanity’s flesh and blood forms. Her use of driftwood, twigs, tree bark and other natural materials are deliberate because of their potential for  deterioration and the suggestion of life within and beyond formlessness. The tendency towards transparency witnessed in her more recent works suggest that Nakazzi is developing an even keener sense of reality and transcending the limitations of three dimensional sculpture. 

Albert Huie always claimed he was born to be an artist. His mother and grandmother who raised him worried about his strange reserved personality and the fact that he spent so much time observing nature or questioning his station in life. Brought up in a strong matriarchal and conservative setting that emphasized discipline and religion, Huie was not encouraged to ponder on the fact that his father, then living in Cuba, had named him Alphonso after the then Cuban president, in fact his grandmother insisted that he be called by his third name – Albert - after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. Despite his earliest scratches on the pantry wall at home, it was not until his teens, that he would find an environment that would stimulate his social awareness and creative abilities.

In 1934, Huie visited Kingston for the first time. Still a youth, he took a keen interest in the pending general election; the political discussions at his cousin’s tailoring establishment on Tower St, the Sunday meetings at Parade held by St William Grant as well as the Christmas morning concert. In fact it was the concert that inspired his first painting entitled The Dance depicting people in their fineries.

In 1936, Huie returned to Kingston to work. He lived by his hands, decorating glass and chinaware with enamel designs. This enabled him to buy his own paint and art materials and pursue his own art in earnest. In 1937, Huie met H.D. Molesworth, then Secretary Librarian of the Institute of Jamaica who still new to his appointment was energized by Jamaica and keen to encourage local talent. Molesworth was the first person to give value to Huie’s work, assisting him his first sale, Molesworth also introduced Huie to Edna Manley and it was under her aegis that he became involved in the free Saturday morning art classes held at the Institute’s Junior Centre. There, Huie joined a young band of artists - expatriates and locals - exchanging skills and ideas, unified by nationalist concerns. This growing sense of Jamaican identity was made manifest in the period by the conscious depiction of the black Jamaicans, genre scenes and renewed interest in the Jamaican landscape.



Huie’s passion for the depiction of Jamaica has remained consistent over the years, and if there has been any criticism of his work, it is that it has remained within this same conservative vein. His style of painting has also changed little, After winning a British Council scholarship in 1947 to study in London, he adopted impressionist techniques of capturing Caribbean light and form that have become distinctive. Yet, French impressionism was just a vehicle for Huie – his concerns were wholly Jamaican and his paintings emphatically reflected this. Even after moving to Canada for health reasons, Huie continued to paint the land and its people into his eighties revisiting vistas and subjects that had come to chracterize his work and were always popluare with Jamaican viewers. Huie's work can be found in nearly all the important local collections and has been the subject of a recent monograph by the art historian Edward Lucie-Smith. 

Khepera Oluyia's work is a powerful mix of the collective and the personal. Through her painting she makes ambitious statements about the ideological systems that seduce, confine and manipulate us in the black diaspora. She challenges these belief systems and provides new models for our consideration and commitment.Jamaica's understanding of political blackness and skin colour are two of her most serious concerns. These are themes she has been exploring since her art school years, combining striking racial portraits with enigmatic titles. Back then, to reinforce her ideas about black strength and dominance, she started using mastic, a black tar substance more usually used for road androof mending. She continues to use mastic in this new series of work, but now she wields its shiny, toffee-like, hot liquid with greater understanding and mastery, sometimes laying it on thick till it cracks, sometimes employing it fluidly so that it creates a 'pollockian' like network of drips and stains.

She cooks this material to make it malleable, working over a coal stove outdoors. Then,  she lays it over metal that she has cut, scraped and battered herself. The combination of heating and forging in the creative process brings to mind  metalwork traditions of African ancestry. And, the connection is correct because Khepera is working with the same spirit of cleansing and renewal closely linked to the West African gods of Shango and Ogun. Against this background of ritualistic vigour and the real possibility of burning herself, she throws herself into her work using her mind’s energy and physical force to render images from these hard hot surfaces. Even as she is doing this, she scours her inner self for deeply hidden imagery shrouded in ‘the darkness’ of the middle passage, slavery, racism, et al. She wills these images to the foreground from their layered entombment. Faces transformed by the fire: dignified visions of the collective self.

Despite Milton George’s attempt to create a minimal expressionist style in the 1980s, his paintings remain complex. Even when he subdues his characteristic use of vibrant colour in favour of a darker palette, his work combusts. Energy emanates from the amount of visual information he provides, not merely in terms of subject matter, but in the urgency and fullness of his brush strokes, in the palpability of the pigment, and the way in which he can describe emotion in and of itself. When this is combined with his keen sense of observation and natural tendency towards satirical story-telling, his work is explosive.

Milton George is a Jamaican storyteller ‘par excellence’. His sources range from politics, male/female relationships, religion, the self and others whom he may have encountered while ‘trodding’ through Kingston. Underlying all these major themes is Milton’s recognition and commentary on the base motives of greed, lust, sin, and hypocrisy that underlie our daily actions. Jamaica provides the perfect playground for his scrutiny. He thrives on that cultures ambiguities; the tensions between political parties; the fantastic and often sordid nature of its preoccupations, and the hypocrisies of its so-called ‘Christian’ society.

Milton ability to negotiate identities allows him to access many walks of life. His series of self-portraits are a record of his quixotic personality, painter, lover, pauper, Rasta, philosopher are all possible within his persona. In a manner that recalls ‘the pantomimicry’ of Caribbean Johnkunu, Milton can create orgiastic scenarios with supporting cast who are equally ambiguous. Such masquerading is an integral part of the Jamaican psyche. The ability to assimilate, accommodate, as well as to mask cruelty or sadness are traits learned through our history. Milton’s power to visualize us in our many roles reflects a clear understanding, not only of himself, but the society that he loves to paint.

Milton tells us about ourselves in a way that is not completely condemnatory. He is no prophet of doom; rather his paintings are a celebration of our frailty. There is something empowering about the viewer’s recognition of self in his paintings, even when it is at its most disturbing. For all their cryptic imagery, Milton’s paintings provoke a sense of ownership and pride. Even in this act of recognition, we are still allowed to laugh at ourselves.

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Australian by birth and trained in Sydney and London, Garland came to Jamaica in 1962 and adopted the newly independent nation as his home. His commitment was immediately reflected in his art that became Jamaican in content. Inspired by both Haitian and Jamaican self-taught painters such as John Dunkley, but underpinned by a taste for the fantastic, in the works of artists such as Botticelli, Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Richard Dadd, he brought a wry, intellectual humour to his depictions of life in the Caribbean.

Garland also showed mastery over his media, his willingness to experiment with new formats, to apply collage and montage techniques as well as create assemblages established him as one of Jamaica’s important modern artists and within a short time Garland’s surrealist/ magic realist style became popular with collectors as well as other artists. By the seventies, his work was regularly selected to represent Jamaica in national group exhibitions.

Trained in theatre and set designs, Garland's paintings although often small in scale read like panoramic epics chocked full of imagery and painted in painstaking detail. And in his forty odd years of painting here, his oeuvre has documented the most significant aspects of island culture as well as his own personal life. However, without a key to Garland’s imagery it is difficult to follow the narrative that he is creating because his work is so strongly based in fantasy, dream imagery and personal anecdotes. As a result the viewer is drawn into their mystery, each composition appears to tell a very intimate story that begs for, yet defies, comprehension. He is renowned for his inclusion of the islands flora and fauna in his compositions as well as his emphasis on animal and female imagery, and even though much of his works stem from ancient history and Greek mythology, he creolizes these themes to giving them Caribbean relevance. As a result, his Madonnas, Venuses, and Demeters are regularly black; more closely related to Azuli the Haitian Goddess of love.

The prominence of the female in his work may also account for the childlike manner in which Garland represents the world, the viewer rather like Alice in Wonderland is thrown into a world of figurative distortion and altered perception all loosely held together by Garland’s decorative and patterning techniques. Even so, like the surrealist Salvador Dali, the level of detail that he brings to each composition and his view of the world, he fools both the eye and the mind by feigning accuracy.

In later years Garland lived in St Mary on Jamaica’s north coast and although he continued to exhibit abroad, through his twenty years as a teacher at the Jamaica School of Art and through his consistent participation in solo and group exhibitions, he became part of the art world mainstream. His surrealist fantasies have had a profound influence on contemporary Jamaican imagery. PA-S

Gloria Escoffery’s talents as an intellect and a painter were apparent from early. As a Jamaica Scholar, after gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree at McGill University in Canada, Escoffery went on to pursue her Masters at the Slade School of Art in London. Like many of her peers such as Ralph Campbell, Barrington Watson and Albert Huie, she absorbed the lessons offered in European art forms, but after returning to Jamaica in the 1950’s she quickly adapted these principles to suit her Caribbean environment and Jamaican vision. She returned from London with a definitive style, no longer content to render her subject matter in representational form. The fusion of influences produced works of a modern, semi-abstract nature replete with local content and Jamaican social realities.

Escoffery's canvases, usually panoramic in scale, depict figures in various poses strung out across the picture plain. These are people/models normally from her hometown; rural workers engaged in some form of labour suggestive of nation building. Her interest in local genre scenes from Brownstown, St Ann where she lived and worked most of her life, was reflective of the mood of the newly independent Jamaica, its people and culture. Even so, Escoffery’s paintings are never propogandised or sentimental, rather, her flat use of colour and linear design give them a precision and sense of deliberation, typical of her enquiring and analytical mind.

Gloria Escoffery was as much a literary figure as an artistic one in Jamaica. For many years, she wrote art reviews for the national newspapers as well as the Jamaica Journal. These articles demonstrated her love of the arts and the breadth of her art historical knowledge. Her favourite painter was Poussin and it is easy to see how, that French classicist’s imagery affected her own compositions. Art Historian, Dr David Boxer remembering Escoffery writes:“Her continued study of his [Poussin’s] works imparted a structural clarity and sound colour sense to her own canvases. Best known for her ‘straight’ paintings of the fifties and sixties and early sixties, it is rather those paintings of the later sixties and seventies, works like The Three Graces and The Centaur that her true imaginative power shines, and reveal her as a true original. In these works she actually ‘quotes’ from  masterpieces of the past and in effect uses them to comment on, or draw parallels with the Jamaican ‘scene’ which she is depicting.” This process of collage/montage became even more sophisticated in her later paintings as Escoffery selected images and scenes from her favourite artists incorporating them into larger works using patterning and other compositional devices. Her works became increasingly ambitions in scale culminating in the five-panelled work Mirage that currently hangs in the library of the University of the West Indies.

During her lifetime, Escoffery’s work was exhibited widely in one person and group exhibitions in Jamaica, England, the US, Europe, Trinidad, Cuba and Puerto Rico.Escoffery died in 2002, her life and work will be the subject of a forthcoming retrospective to be mounted at the National Gallery of Jamaica.PA-S

John Dunkley is considered one of modern Jamaica’s first and finest intuitive artists painters. Like so many self-taught painters that would follow in his wake, Dunkley emerged from that class of self-employed, skilled artisans who lived by their hands. John Dunkley was a barber,

Dunkley’s early life appears to have been filled with misfortune and adventure that may account for his unique vision. Born in Savannah-la-Mar, at the age of seven he suffered an accident that damaged one of his eyes and affected his schooling, as a result, as a teenager he was sent to his father living in Panama. There again, tragedy struck, he arrived to find that his father had recently died, dashing his hopes for the future. Alone, and at the outbreak of the Great War, he became a sailor and is reported to have travelled through South and Central America, North America finally returning to Cheriqui, Panama where he took up painting and came under the influence of the painter Clarence Rock.

He would not return to Jamaica until 1926, when in his thirties, he married Cassie Dunkley and settled to run a small barbershop on Princess Street in Kingston. It was here that Dunkley also established a small studio for painting, where young Jamaicans congregated to discuss politics and world affairs, as well as view his latest works. Although Dunkley did not exhibit regularly, the small group of artists who painted at the Institute of Jamaica knew him, but he never became a formal member of that group, Somehow, Dunkley felt that his concerns were different.

Today, there is nothing that compares to John Dunkley’s imagination. His melancholy paintings speak of another dimension where man is subject to nature filled with spiders, crabs, frogs, birds, rodents haunt ravines, rocks and lopped trees. The landscapes of his mind, obviously unreal, are nevertheless hauntingly familiar. They are desolate dream worlds, where timid animals observe the lonely paths and gloomy roads. Dunkley’s motifs are constantly recurring reinforcing their hypnotic quality. His imagery points to a subconscious or disguised symbolism that might justify a surrealist label, yet Dunkley’s style defies categorization. As Dr David Boxer, National Gallery of Jamaica curator has written:

“ This was a truly intuitive painter if ever there was one. Little in the history of Western art prepares us for Dunkley. While at times his work puts us in mind of Samual Palmer or Albert Pinkham Ryder, there is a hypnotic rhythmic intensity in Dunkley’s paintings that is alien to English and American masters. Indeed, it is an African severity of rhythm, form, and colour that in the final analysis separates Dunkley from the Western romantics that his work at times recalls.”


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Ras Dizzy is v\ocal against the injustices he meets within Jamaican society. A temperamental artist, he will 'curse you' as readily as he will tutor you in his reading from the Bible. His uneven temperament is reflected in his painting but, in his lucid moments, he paints powerfully and lyrically, with deep insight into the history of Jamaica and its people. Also a poet and a writer, his titles are often enigmatic and he is not averse to writing within his paintings. Favourite themes are cowboys, that hark back to the era of the 'western movie', popular in Jamaica duing the 1960s and still a prevalent theme within dance hall culture, and which recall his own expereinces/fantasies(?) of being a jockey at Caymanas race track and other race courses throughout the Caribbean, doctor birds (Jamaica's national bird) and local flora (probably a response to tourist demands), spiritual messages, wherin he sees himself as a saviour of the Jamaican people, and images of slavery and Jamaican history.

Extract from New World Imagery (exhib.cat) 1995

Leonard Daley’s mural like outpourings have all the power of Dubuffet’s Art Brut, or the Surrealist imagery of Andre Masson, yet with none of the self-conscious denial employed by these modern artists. In 1987 when Daley’s work was included in the Fifteen Intuitives exhibition, David Boxer could still write with honesty that Leonard Daley had no concept of his work as being art, in the sense of a commodity. He painted on fragments of used tarpaulin and plywood, often utilizing both sides of these surfaces and had no desire to title his work. Today, a realism tinged with sadness is sensed in the fact that Daley now conforms to more formal methods of presentation, using more durable and readily exhibited materials, suggesting that even with the sensitive ‘protection’ of the National Gallery of Jamaica, this intuitive is far more aware than he used to be. Nevertheless, his imagery is still visually powerful.

To view Daley's work is to enter a claustrophobic hysterical world of spirits, specters, and ‘bad-minded’ people. One of Daley’s devices is to slice the head in profile thus revealing the inner workings of the mind and the many thoughts, good and evil, that take place there. Often the results are terrifying, since Daley’s assessment of the world is a very judgmental one. For him the process of depiction is purgative, and the imagery he displays, is often violent, bloody and cruel. Yet, the hellish nature of his painting is not indicative of the artists personality, rather, Daley’s work operates within a type of evangelical ethic, closely aligned to the Pentecostal churches so prevalent in Jamaica. These churches preach a gospel that acts as a kind of bridge between African spiritual beliefs and Christian orthodoxy that suggest redemption through images that are at once sacrificial and violent. The blood of the lamb that washes whiter than snow, though gruesome, represents purity and salvation, in much the same way, Daley’s works exorcise demons in order to cleanse and liberate the mind. He says…

‘All my work, its just automatically.[sic] I close my eyes and I pray a lot. Sometimes tears fall down…sometimes I sit down and look at the plain wall, and I can’t penetrate it. And so I will use some water in my mouth, and spew it on the wall, and whatever way it dries it comes out as a picture…I read it and the next thing I look at the sunset and I look at the moon and sometimes when I am concerned about certain situation I meditate. I don’t eat much food’.

Yet, like the surrealist Joan Miro’s work of the 1920s, Daley’s work is more hallucinatory than visionary, a self-inflicted libation that produces horrific imagery of nightmarish quality. In this world there is little light, a muddy and bloody palette pervades, while animals and men mutate into monsters that haunt every available space. Although we know this is a mental rather than a physical space, its latent pantheism suggests a fascinating interpretation of the world not altogether incredible. Certainly, the introduction of Daley’s work within mainstream Jamaican art circles was greeted with an immediate comprehension, since it seemed to join forces with the tormented configurations of ‘new imagists’ such as Milton George and Omari Ra. Yet, Daley’s unique vision is his own protection from being subsumed by any artistic movement. The unique nature of his visions are such that they suggest biblical and psychological rather than historical interpretations and it is perhaps these considerations that will ensure that he continues to paint from intuition rather than intellect.

© PA-S

Essay extracted and edited from the Home and Away exhibition catalogue, London, 1998

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