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Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write
Great writers from all parts of the Caribbean have always created vivid pictures in the minds of the readers of their poetry, novels and essays. What we have here, in this beautiful selection of three contemporary Jamaican multi-talented artists...
Price
£8.99
Author(s)
Jacqueline Bishop
Earl McKenzie
Ralph Thompson
ISBN number
9781845230647
Pages
48
Price
£8.99
Classification
Art & Art Criticism
Essays
Country setting
Trinidad and Tobago
Jamaica
Publication date
01 Sep 2007
Great writers from all parts of the Caribbean have always created vivid pictures in the minds of the readers of their poetry, novels and essays. What we have here, in this beautiful selection of three contemporary Jamaican multi-talented artists, is a continuation and strengthening of a long tradition of the concretization of literary allusions in visual form. Jacqueline Bishop, so well known for her poems and her ‘artistic activism’ offers us, in her paintings, a series of delicately evanescent webs. We are reminded here of the random patterns of surf on the sand or the midnight spinnings of a spider. Earl McKenzie’s sober still life paintings have the suggestive power of Giorgio Morandi, one of the greatest masters of the simple object. His up-close images speak in a direct, unadorned fashion of the unexpected complexities of everyday life. Ralph Thompson’s landscapes and figure studies, reminiscent of such powerful masters as Cézanne or the African-American painter Beauford Delaney, demonstrate a remarkable sensitivity to the expressive power of form and color.
Edward J. Sullivan,
Professor of Art History & Dean for the Humanities
New York University
Variations
Jacqueline Bishop
Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City
Earl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia.
Ralph Thompson was born in America in 1928. His family on his mother’s side goes back three generations in Jamaica, a mixture of crypto Jewish (Isaacs) and Irish stock (Fielding). It was staunchly Catholic and claimed to be white. His mother’s marriage lasted only three years and she returned to Jamaica and brought up her two children aided and abetted by a household of intellectually brilliant but poor and highly eccentric aunts and uncles.