Caribbean Artists A-Z
View my articles about Caribbean and Diaspora Artists. Research over 100 artists, their sites and thumbnails of their art work in alphabetical order. Click on artists names for links to the full story or artists' websites or watch videos. Students, cite this material with appropriate references guided by copyright. 'Fair use' allows you to use images in thumbnail size only.
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…
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…
Born 1928, in Exuma and educated at Roker’s Point School in Exuma. Ferguson became a house painter in Nassau and began fine art painting after receiving ‘divine instruction’. He is completely self-taught and has become the country’s best known intuitive artist. His distinctive signature “paint by Amos Ferguson” was also the title of a successful one-man exhibition held in 1985 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticutt. The National Art Gallery of The…
Born 1928, in Exuma and educated at Roker’s Point School in Exuma. Ferguson became a house painter in Nassau and began fine art painting after receiving ‘divine instruction’. He is completely self-taught and has become the country’s best known intuitive artist. His distinctive signature “paint by Amos Ferguson” was also the title of a successful one-man exhibition held…
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…
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…
Although his post-graduate training was received from several notable institutions abroad such as the California College of Arts and Crafts and Spellman College, Atlanta, Georgia, Christopher Gonzales can claim an art-historical lineage that references his earliest influences from the Jamaica School of Art. As one of the first students to graduate from the institution, his works reverently acknowledges the symbolism of Edna Manley, and the paintings of his tutor Barrington Watson. Yet, none…
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…