Shemar Marks- Form 2D

Jamaican
Painters

Carl Abrahams (1913-2005)

Born in 1913, Abrahams like so many schoolboys took up caricaturing his schoolmasters
while in his teens at Calabar College. Similarly, he applied his skills to drawing automobiles (the
rage of that era) and emulated his father who also created car designs. It was a schoolboy talent
that he was reluctant to outgrow and encouraged by his headmaster Rev. Ernest Price he began
copying old master paintings as well as documenting local Jamaican scenes. In addition, he
became fascinated with spiritual and mythical topics and tried to depict the scenes he visualized
from his reading of the Bible and Greek classics. These are the themes that he would return to
repeatedly during his long career as an artist.

Abrahams has often proclaimed himself the father of Jamaican art, insisting that he was the
first Jamaican born artist working independently to document Jamaicas environs in the 1930s
and there is some evidence to support his boasts. As early as 1937, the British artist Augustus
John, on a brief trip to Jamaica, reported that Carl Abrahams had a talent that should be nurtured,
and in 1938 following the publication of some of his watercolours in the West Indian Review,
editor Esther Chapman wrote:

The works on the following pages are works by Carl Abrahams, a young Jamaican. Mr
Abrahams has been doing newspaper cartoons of some merit for several years, but was unaware

that the drawings illustrated here were far more interesting to critics. So far, Jamaica has
depended for his art upon such imported artists as Edna Manley and Koren [der Harootian]. Mr
Abrahams, apparently uninfluenced by either shows a striking originality and great promise in
his works

Today, Abrahams paintings are highly collectible and he won his popularity with Jamaican art
lovers because of an engaging style that meets the viewers need for narrative representation, but
with imagery that also appears modern. The combination of Abrahams simplified forms, dark
outlines, bold and acidic colours easily distinguish his painting. It is stylized but not stylish.
Sometimes combined with frames that are hand crafted and seductively ornate, his choice of
subject matter, his sardonic wit, and his idiosyncratic style confirm that Abrahams is a unique
and significant Caribbean artist.

Everald Brown
Everald Brown's art and spirituality are intricately bound together. His painting,
sculptures and patterned musical instruments, become more vivid as his understanding of his
environment, the world and his place in the universe matures. His complex spiritual beliefs that
come from a Baptist upbringing and his rastafarian faith, are reflected in imagery full of biblical
references, signs, symbols and historical anecdotes. Now into his eighties, the wisdom and skill
of his paintings show that he is an artist of special intuition and vision; a true elder of Jamaican
art.
Born in 1917, Everald Brown's spiritual path takes a clear trajectory from a confining orthodoxy
under colonialism to a world view that is now syncretic and distinctly Caribbean. Looking at his
art in the context of Jamaican history, it is possible to see how his life, beliefs and paintings have
been shaped by events significant to the island. It is also clear that his imagery and his role as a
seer have had an impact on Jamaicans increasingly alienated from their history. His gifts are
peculiar, he is a rare bridge between past and present, between one culture and another, between
our daily realities and the spiritual world. He is a link with Jamaican self-hood that we cannot
afford to lose.
Raised in rural Clarendon, Everald Brown's beliefs were influenced by a Baptist pentecostalism
that had accommodated African rituals from Myalism, Revivalism and Kumina. Its evangelical
tradition allowed for "speaking in tongues", personal testimonies, and ritual water cleansing and
helped to retain similar African practices into the 20th century. Brown's Baptist upbringing was a
fertile spiritual grounding, and while still young he began to have apocalyptic visions that would
fire his artistic imagination.
Millenarianism, the belief in Christian prophesy that a Kingdom of God would be established
with the second coming of Christ, was prevalent among the lower classes in the first few decades
of this century. Seeing little escape from their social realities, the poor in the urban slums placed
their confidence in spiritual escape. One after the other, charismatic figures marketed their
utopia. Up to 1950, the self- proclaimed prophet Bedward, the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey

and the pioneer of Rastafarianism L.P. Howell, all attracted lower class mass support as Jamaica
struggled to break colonial rule.
At twenty, Everald Brown's move to Kingston with new wife Jenny was typical of the urban drift
by many young families in search of work and opportunity in the 1940's. He became part of the
transient class that proved a captive audience for religious and political leaders. Brown fell in
with Joseph Hibbert, whose followers, unlike those of L.P. Howell, did not wear "locks" or
smoke ganja. Hibbert encouraged Brown to interpret his visions and respect this gift as an aspect
of his divinity. Brown accepted Rastafarianism and its accommodatopm of elements of the
revival practices, such as drumming and chant worship, that had featured in his childhood.
Brown's conversion came after a series of visions where the divinity of the then Emperor of
Ethiopia Haille Selassie, was revealed to him. In the next fifteen years, Brown devoted his life to
building a Rastafarian assembly and becoming an elder in the Ethiopian Orthodox ministry. He
raised ten children, who, along with his wife, shared in his mystical experiences and formed the
nucleus of his church community called "The Assembly of the Living". His visions or
meditational "travels" as he calls them, became an important feature of his preaching that Haille
Selassie was the Messiah, the returned Christ. Brown also began to paint seriously, using his
works as a medium for his teachings. His paintings depicted Old and New Testament narratives
reinterpreted to promote Rastafarian doctrines and themes from Jamaican history.

Ralph Campbell
The development of Ralph Campbells career as a painter parallels similar developments
in Jamaicas modern art history. It is not surprising that his maturation as a painter mirrors the
same process of maturation in Jamaicas cultural institutions, since a great deal of his artistic
achievements were due to their foundation. In his lifetime as an artist he experienced the birth of
Jamaican art as well as its rise to public acclaim.
Initially attending the informal Saturday morning classes at the Institute of Jamaica, Campbell
was one of the first students to benefit from the establishment of formal art classes at the
DaCosta Institute and its outgrowth, the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts, In his earliest years he
was taught sculptural modeling by Edna Manley, but painting was his strength. In time he would
return to his alma mater as a painting tutor, making his own contribution to institutional
development.
But Campbells education was not confined to Jamaica, in the 1950s he was a beneficiary of a
British Council scholarship and studied at Goldsmiths in London, later he would also study in
Chicago. Throughout his career, his skills as a painter became more confident as was exposed to
formal tuition and other artistic influences. This transition can be seen in his painting.

Campbell was always a representational painter, but his style was highly expressive. His
paintings were always fresh and spontaneous, even after being exposed to art movements abroad,
Unlike his contemporaries, Huie, Escoffery and Alexander Cooper he shunned style and painted
with freedom and an awkward relationship to proportion and perspective. But one senses that his
disregard of formal principles is willful rather than negligent. Whether painting nudes, or
landscapes, he was a painter of bold gestures and expression suggestive of the French painter
Cezanne before the advent of Impressionism. His work reflected the energy and vitality of his
robust personality.
In terms of content, he was a true son of the soil focusing on themes that demonstrated his
strong sense of nationalism. He was a true genre painter documenting scenes around him that
reflected his commitment to an independent Jamaica.
Campbell died in 1985, his work is considered highly collectable and can be found in many local
and international private collections.

Margaret Chen
Educated at the Jamaica School of Art, Margaret Chen left Jamaica after graduating with
distinction to pursue post-graduate studies in Canada at York University, Ontario. It was in
Canada also that she began her career as a sculptor, exhibiting in a number of Toronto galleries
with increasing success. It is significant however that in the 1980s Margaret chose to return to
Jamaica for her first solo exhibition at the Upstairs Downstairs Galleries; to establish her studio,
and to become a important contributor to group exhibitions locally and Jamaican exhibitions
abroad.
Her work, usually large in scale and tending towards installation, is distinguished by her
painstaking attention to detail and meticulous finish. These assemblages of natural and manmade materials normally take months and years to come to fruition and as a result her solo
exhibitions are rare. Even so, there is continuity as she works from one major work or theme to
the next. She says: My work happens as a result of the mysterious interweaving of process and
content, the inanimate and animate, matter and spirit. The creative process for me is an on-going
and progressive one that builds up layer by layer, work after work.
I cannot sever the past from my present works. Wherever I stand, whatever I do, my history is
very much a part of my work, its base lying in the sum total of selected fragments from the past.

More recently she has explained this process in greater detail explaining how one work naturally
grows out of another. It is the process that drives her towards new boundaries and revelations.
She says:
It is in hindsight that I perceive my work as an ongoing process, an attempt to plumb the depths
of that primordial slime from which life first emerged and to reveal to oneself again and again,
through work after work, the site of ones own origin.