Artists of the Caribbean

Artists of the Caribbean: Barrington Watson

POSTED MARCH 2, 2022

The Caribbean Sea is one of the world's most beautiful regions.  Not surprisingly, beautiful art has come from the islands of this vast melting pot with watercolors, paintings and murals reflecting the vibrant colors of the land and sea.  It is debatable whether a unified and cohesive culture exists or ever has existed within the Caribbean.  The identity of each island is unique, shaped to different degrees by each's European colonizers, African heritage, and indigenous peoples.  

The Caribbean's true art history dates back to the rock art and body painting carried out by the indigenous Arawak and Taino Indian peoples. For most of the Caribbean countries, art in its more modern sense began when they became independent from their colonizers.  Besides portraying the Caribbean's great natural beauty, paintings also reflect the region's African heritage and, more recently, post-modern concerns of identity and cultural diversity.  Largely unexplored by the major players in the art world, Caribbean art remains mysterious and unknown to most.

We start this series on the art of the Caribbean with the father of Jamaican modern art and one of Jamaica's most popular artists, Barrington Watson.  Born in Hanover, Jamaica, in 1931, trained in European academies including the Royal College of Art in London and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, "Barrington" returned to Jamaica in 1961 and quickly rose to prominence as a major artist in post-Independence Jamaica. Many of his artworks, depicting figurative and realistic images of the poor and working classes and the politically disenfranchised, are characterized as Social Realism.  

An example of this style and one of Barrington's most famous works is The Garden Party, a 3 meter x 6 meter mural-sized painting commissioned by the Bank of Jamaica.  Contemporary history paintings often include portraits of recognizable people, locations and events of recent memory. All of these are ingredients of  The Garden Party (1976), which Barrington describes as 'a celebration of the maturity of Independence.' "The Garden Party concentrates on the situation in Jamaica during the 1970s, a decade marked by Michael Manley's democratic socialism. Watson regarded the painting as 'something like a serious amusement' as it mixes scenes of political relevance with more comical incidents. As a whole, it offers a complex panorama of Jamaican society during that moment in time when the political situation was tense, fear of Communism was widespread, many people fled the island, and yet people went about their everyday business, went to school and played sports."  As the characters engage in numerous conversations, workers are hoeing fields, a boxing match is underway, and cricket players are enjoying the day behind a central grouping of four women in bright primary colored dresses. This "Broom Crew" is an often-cited detail of the painting.

Barrington's appeal reaches across Jamaica’s social boundaries, beyond the social class that typically supports fine art.  Other than the obvious artistic merit of his work, it is his capacity to produce powerfully iconic and highly relatable images, such as Mother and Child (1959) and Conversation (1981), that has ensured his continuing popularity.

Sources: What Do We Know About Caribbean Art ? | Widewalls ,  USA Today,  Jamaica-Gleaner, Repeating Islands, Caribbean Elections, National Gallery of Jamaica

Images and quotes on this website may be subject to copyright.  Their inclusion on this site is within the fair use doctrine of copyright law.

Mariño's sculpture La Patera (The Raft) was exhibited at the Eighth Havana Biennial in 2003 and signaled a change in direction for the artist.  No longer is the black figure traversing the Western art world.  "The artist’s gaze now seems to return to the island...The word 'patera' is used in Spain, where Mariño lived [during that period], to identify the narrow rafts of balseros who, coming from North Africa, perilously cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach the coast of Andalusia or the Canary Islands. In La Patera, atop the numerous legs, the body of a vintage...car is placed, old American technology kept alive in Cuba by the twin forces of love and recycling."  (Africanah website)  

The original La Patera sculpture no longer exists but the pastel above is a sketch for that installation.*

Romantic pessimism

Mariño's works often have a sense of pathos about them, described as a "romantic pessimism" by one writer.  Mariño sets a central figure - almost invariably alone - in elements of the natural world and creates a surrealistic, almost psychedelic, environment for his subject.  "Lonely Girl" is walking along a fallen tree trunk, while the young man in "Narcissus" stares at a larger than life reflection of himself in a pond as a gentle snow falls.

Photos and News Stories

The inspiration for some of Mariño's works come from news stories and photographs - either his own or gleaned from the internet.  He later incorporates the subject matter into into his art.   The places and people embedded within the works "are suffused with social and political significance [and]  Mariño's recent works are rooted within some of the stories of migration that many people have undertaken in search of a new life."(Coates & Scarry Gallery)

"No Borders" from 2019 is one such work.  A young dark-skinned man standing near a cactus in the desert is surveying the uncertain path ahead of him.

Some websites where you can see more of Marino's work and learn more about the artist: Africanah, Oh By The Way, Cuban Art Resources, Artsy

Note: *A second version of The Raft was commissioned in 2010 by the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburg, PA and subsequently acquired by 21c Museum in January 2011.  Photograph of this second version of the sculpture can be found here. 

Fair Use Notice: Images and quotes on this website may be subject to copyright.  Their inclusion on this site is within the fair use doctrine of copyright law.

Artists of the Caribbean: Wifredo Lam

POSTED JUNE 29,2022 [to aotc page]

One of the most renowned Cuban artists of the modern era, Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982) was the son of a Chinese immigrant father and a mother of Spanish and African descent.  Growing up in the sugar farming village of Sagua la Grande in Cuba, his early art was influenced both by Catholic as well as African traditions and imbued with spiritual practices that he learned from his godmother, a Santería priestess and locally-celebrated healer. Lam is best known for his large scale paintings which combine a modernist style and Afro-Cuban imagery to explore themes of social injustice, spirituality and rebirth.  

In 1916, he moved to Havana to study law, but soon became more interested in painting.  In 1923 he moved to Madrid on a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.  Lam became greatly motivated by his trips to the nearby Prado Museum, where he encountered the works of Diego Velázquez, Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco de Goya. Inspired by Goya’s studies of political corruption, Lam went on to use his own work as a way of condemning the horrors of war.  

He spent the 1930's in Europe, and his personal and artistic experiences would have a lasting effect on his work.  In 1931, he lost both his wife and infant son to tuberculosis, and this sorrow is reflected in some of Lam’s early work.  In 1936, Lam fought for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The turmoil of this experience also became a frequent theme within his paintings, which concentrated on dynamic groupings of figures.  Lam relocated to Paris in 1938.  While there he befriended Pablo Picasso, who introduced Lam to leading artists, including André Breton, Joan Miró and Óscar Domínguez. During this time Lam’s work moved towards a modernist style, as he began to experiment with cubist techniques and showed an interest in the surrealists’ exploration of the subconscious and automatism. 

Mother and Child II from 1939 reflects the Cubist and Surrealist influences and Afro-Cuban imagery that were to inform his future work.  The Pieta-like pose reflects his Catholic tradition and honors the memory of his deceased young wife and infant son.

Lam returned to Cuba in 1941, where his attention turned to the island nation's fraught social conditions and its lush tropical flora led to a new unique artistic style that featured chimeric figures with elements derived from local plants, African masks and mammalian limbs. Several key influences intersected during this period: Lam’s consciousness of Cuba’s socio-economic realities; his artistic formation in Europe under the influence of Surrealism; and his re-acquaintance with Afro-Caribbean culture.  This remarkable collision resulted in the artist’s most notable work, The Jungle. 

The Jungle

The Jungle from 1943 is Lam's most famous painting.  We can see the cultural hybridity characteristic of Lam's life and work in the bamboo-like stalks of wild sugar cane, the oval-like faces, and the clear Cubist influence on the painting.  The cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square.  The Khan Academy calls Lam’s bold painting "a game of perception" in which the artist "haphazardly constructs the figures from a collection of distinct forms—crescent-shaped faces; prominent, rounded backsides; willowy arms and legs; and flat, cloddish hands and feet."  Another significant element is how he places the figures within an unorthodox landscape - Lam’s panorama excludes the typical elements of a horizon line, sky or wide view.  

The image of the femme cheval (the horse-headed woman who appears in many of Lam's paintings) on the far left and the image of the Santería priestess next to her act “not only as protectors and disseminators of Afro-Cuban culture, but also as models of empowerment over and against their white exploiters and colonizers.”  One part of this scene—sugarcane—is alien to the jungle setting suggested by the painting’s title.  In 1940s Cuba, sugarcane was big business, requiring the toil of thousands of laborers similar to the cotton industry in the American South before the Civil War. The reality of laboring Cubans was in sharp contrast to how foreigners perceived the island nation as a playground.  Tourism posters of that time depicted the country as a destination for Americans seeking beachside resorts.  

Throughout the rest of his career, Lam would move between Paris, New York, Italy and Cuba.  His later works included many highly abstract paintings such as The Third World [below], which he painted in a nod to the ideals of the Cuban Revolution for the Presidential Palace in Havana in 1965.  In 1983, one year after Lam's death, the Wifredo Lam Centre for Contemporary Art was founded.  Since 1984, it has hosted the Havana Biennial, which features artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.  This tradition turned Havana into an important venue for the gathering and exhibition of ‘non-Western’ art.

At the time of Wifredo Lam's death in 1982, Latin American painting still barely registered on the international art market. The rediscovery of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the 1980's changed that.  Lam's paintings have gained wider recognition since that time and in 2020, his Omi Obini sold for $9.6 million.  

Completed the same year as The Jungle, Omi Obini [below] contains many of that painting's elements, particularly its blend of European modernism and Afro-Cuban culture.  The luminous central figure, Omi Obini, is also a female protector, "woman of water, she is the Lady of Fresh Waters who fertilizes the earth and dances, dispensing life."   There are elements of magical realism in this painting - the thin, watercolor-like applications of paint convey a sense of the permeability between the physical and metaphysical realms. 

The Sotheby's webpage linked here has  a dynamic "viewing" video as well as an informative discussion of the symbolism and artistic technique of Omi Obini and its place in Lam's body of work.

Sources: Tate Museum, europeana, Wikipedia, Arte Aldia, Khan Academy, Medium, Britannica, WifredoLam. net, Biennial Foundation, Sotheby's