I am often asked the question what is my work about which is a little like being asked what is life about because in art as in life each person must bring their own experience and provide their own answers. Quite simply my work is about life and the enigma that surrounds existence. I make reference to specific experiences or draw on visual reality to act as a frame to the broader content and people bring their own interpretations as well.
When I began painting in the 60's I was focused on talking about natural phenomena that I found around me in Jamaica, such as the sea, the mountains, or the moon but I was also trying to find a language that expressed the essence of that place I called home.
In 1980 I travelled to Baltimore USA and my visual surroundings changed completely. This city had none of the natural landscape but it had beautiful stained glass windows and during my year at the Maryland Institute I produced a large body of work called "Windows". This included prints as well as paintings of the secular as well as the ecclesiastical windows. Someone looking at the work once said a window is either for "letting something out or letting something in" and I found that expressed the essence of the window paintings whether they were Rose windows in churches or old art nouveau stained glass windows in some of the homes or windows in modern buildings.
This series was followed by "Old Book" a series about the medieval manuscripts of the Koran. I had long wanted to do a series of paintings about these manuscripts because this art is one of the most "abstract" and yet has such emotional power. It was my most successful series. People enjoyed these paintings for some reason maybe it was the emotional content I mentioned
The work briefly returned to nature with serial paintings of the 90's with "Garden" series "Night" and "Clouds" but time and changing events took me into different, more political subject matter.
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