Jamaican artist

O'Neil Lawrence

O'Neil Lawrence is a trained photographer and a graduate of both the University of the West Indies and the Edna Manley College of The Visual and Performing Arts. His work questions the new World experience and what it means to be Jamaican. Because of this, issues related to Africa, slavery, the Middle Passage and our resulting actions and values all figure in his work. In particular, he considers the role of religion in our lives recognizing that Christianity, once a tool of enslavement and colonization, has been creolized to accommodate our African heritage.

Lawrence's photographs are both personal and political as he uses his own denuded body to pose questions about the larger issues of identity and belonging. In Redefined, a recent series created for the Curator Eye III exhibition Ceremony this critique is staged on the Jamaican shoreline, the site of our 're-birthing'. His naked body is strung out along the coastline caught in various ceremonial acts that suggest baptism and renewal.

But Lawrence's photographs are not always so positive. More recently he has begun to explore notions of separation and loss, incorporating the female form into his outdoor theatre, in ways that are poignant but also disconcerting.

Eugene Hyde (1931-1980

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

Kofi Kayiga

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.

William 'Woody' Joseph (1919-2000)

Born in rural in the hills of St Andrew, William ‘Woody’ Joseph’s talent as an artist was not recognized by Jamaica’s art ‘cognicenti’ until fairly late in his life. Initially, within his rural community he was considered something of a curiosity and even accused of Obeah and devil worship by members of his community. In that relatively conservative Christian setting, his sculptures were considered graven images and a challenge to Old Testament biblical traditions. Even in the face of this opposition Woody continued to carve. With no formal training or knowledge of western artistic principles, he was guided by his inner visions that he felt compelled to execute.

The inspiration for Woody’s work was ancestral memory, his images represent archetypal forms that can be linked to an African heritage. Of all the self-taught artists to have emerged in Jamaica, Woody’s work bears the closest resemblance to West African sculptures and it is difficult to account for this striking similarity. His heads, figures, strange totem like fetishes, suggest that they are archetypal images – a vision retained deep within the psyche.Woody approach to his work is also comparable to that of African artistic tradition. Guided by intuition he first selects his wood that is normally cedar (because the rafters of King Solomon’s temple were also made of cedar). Next, he muses on the ‘spirit’ within the wood itself, and he claims that the wood speaks to him as he works. He is merely releasing its hidden spirit. In this way he reveals faces of people, angels and animals distinguished by their their unusual patterns and markings; each one taking on its own character and sense of personage Finally, the work is coloured, sometimes in a logwood bath that gives it a deep burnished tone and that also helps to protect it from termites, at other times its is dyed black and highly polished. The result is minimalistic but nevertheless striking, from small to large each of Woody’s pieces come to life referencing religious and folk imagery of duppies, river maids, kings and queens. It is a hierarchy of images from a time past but not forgotten.

Woody’s work came to the attention of Jamaica’s art world during the 1980s through the support of the National Gallery that has maintained a policy of integrating the work of self taught artists into its national Collection. However, Woody’s work’ that so clearly references Africa, evokes strong emotion from many who are anxious to distance themselves from the experience of slavery and the past. It is for this reason that Woody’s work like that of other intuitives has always been greeted with ambivalence and uncertain patronage. PA-S

Nakazzi Hutchinson

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

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 Hatsheptwa

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.

Lawrence Graham -Brown

Lawrence Graham Brown is a Jamaican artist living in New Jersey, USA who has been exhibiting in Jamaica since the 1990's. His work is stridently race conscious, wrestling with issues related to Black and gay self-hatred, Black-ness, Jamaican-ness, African-ness, sexuality, class and religion. He achieves all this through a self-taught direct style that calls on Rastafari and Garvey symbolism.

Often beginning with found objects, the pan-African colours red, green and black are a regular feature that help to distinguish and 'package' his work. Like a shorthand these colours underpin his imagery and re-enforce their political statements. Next, is the use of crude lines, rough edges and broken forms that suggest violence but also immediacy and gut feelings. Finally, his writing, like graffiti supplies a narrative for works that regularly run in series. Niggah Deh Winner is just such an example, where the words compulsively stamped on every surface become an integral part of compositions that tell a story about black supremacy but also commodification.

Because of the strident nature of his works, they have occasionally come under institutional scrutiny and censorship. This is symptomatic of the Caribbean's bourgeoise patrons who support art but are still coming to terms with issues of identity, and the very self hatred that Graham Brown's work contests. But Graham-Brown's work is unrelenting and as our middle classes become more informed about race issues, his work gain greater acceptance.

Milton George

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.

© PA-S

Laura Facey

Laura Facey is in an enormously productive phase of her work. Recently, she has completed some of the most challenging pieces of her professional life. Spirit Dancer 1999, Earth to Earth 1999, Christ Ascending 2000, Indigo Prayer 2000, and Still Singing 2001 are a group of installations and commisioned works that evidence this surge, all the more remarkable because of their commanding scale and robust physicality. These life size figures with their healthiness have usurped the fragmented body parts and fragile puppet strung forms, that this sculptor sometimes spent months and years honing and refining. Her recent works boldly announce a victory for beauty and vigour over the negative energy that underpinned works such as Goddess of Change 1993. This transformation of output, scale, and content tells the story of a profound shift in Laura Facey's life, productivity and spirituality.

The body, especially the female form, has been a constant in Laura Facey's assemblages. It has been her way of inserting herself into the interior worlds she has explored since childhood. Back then, these worlds were mythical fairyscapes inhabited by Caribbean ghouls and gremlins that echoed a childlike innocence and love of nature. In later years she would act out these fantasies, shunning city life in favour of hunting and fishing trips with her husband to Salt Island, Jamaica, where they had a 'home' with no running water or electricity. Like children of nature they lived primitivelly and instinctively, and Laura used the bones and feathers from the birds they hunted, perhaps believing that they would live on through her work. When personal troubles entered her life, it was this instinct for survival that drove her work. As the backdrop of Salt Island's mangroves and gremlins gave way to pacifying hues of blue and a more inner landscape, the female body, severed and fragile, insinuated itself into her work with increasing persistence.

But looking at Laura Facey's work is always a beautiful experience. Her bodies, despite their mutilation, are perfectly formed and pristine in their presentation. She brings to her exploration of pain, a truth to form, and a personal poetry that makes each piece exquisite. Her tendency to minimalism, means that she only gives the viewer what is essential, and the gesture of the body in all its sadness or wholesomeness, speaks silently and powerfully.

And there is always a tale, because Laura Facey is essentially a story teller as shown in her own children's story Talisman the Goat 1976 and her illustrations for Chairworm and Supershark 1992. Her assemblages harness her earliest experiences in theatre design and her natural tendency to gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork). With these skills she tells us a tale about her life, and her use of found objects, family memorabilia and poetry are the clues she offers for unravelling its mystery. Such exploration of her interior world, motivates works such as Surrender 1997 and Still Singing 2001; works of transformation, that show the body transcending its environment and yielding to a higher form of spirituality. A process the artist describes as "coming out of a fog".

The clarity in Laura Facey's recent works is a sign of her coming to terms with her past, and, reading between the lines of sculpted poetry need no longer be a chilling experience. The exaltation that supports Christ Ascending, or the interior space opened up by the athletic arc of her demeter like form in Earth to Earth tell a new story about renewal in this artist's life; a story of healing.