John Dunkley – Back to Nature (1939), mixed media on board, Collection: NGJ

John Dunkley’s life was typical of that of many Jamaicans of his generation. He was born in Savanna-la-Mar on December 10, 1891 and died in Kingston on February 17, 1947. As a young man, Dunkley travelled to Panama, Costa Rica and Cuba and also worked as a sailor, before returning to Jamaica in 1926 where he settled in Kingston and established a barber shop. His early biography is sketchy but it is well possible that Dunkley worked on the Panama Canal or with the United Fruit Company – a personal connection to the banana industry is suggested by his best known painting, Banana Plantation (c1945). According to his widow Cassie, Dunkley started painting while he was outside of Jamaica and was introduced to art by a well-known Panama-based photographer, Clarence Rock, but we have to date not been able to identify this photographer. (Dunkley 1948)

In Jamaica, Dunkley was discovered around 1937 by one of the talent scouts of the early nationalist art movement, Institute of Jamaica Secretary Delves Molesworth, who saw the unusual paintings he had produced to decorate his barber’s shop on Princess Street and encouraged him to exhibit his work. Dunkley was one of two Jamaican artists, along with the young Albert Huie, whose work was included in the IBM international art exhibition at the 1939 New York City World Fair. While he obviously received some recognition during his lifetime, he was an outsider to the artistic mainstream and appears to have preferred for things to remain that way – it has been reported that he was invited to attend Edna Manley’s art classes at the Junior Centre but declined, stating that he saw things “a little differently.” (Boxer 1998, 17) Today, Dunkley is canonized as one of the most important Jamaican artists of the 20th century. This reputation is based on less than fifty known paintings, most of them landscapes, and a few figural sculptures, all dating from the late 1930s and 1940s, which reflect a unique, visionary artistic imagination.

John Dunkley, Banana Plantation (c1945), Collection: NGJ

Dunkley was mainly a painter of landscapes, which are at least in part based on observed realities in Jamaica, Cuba and Central America but which have rightly been described as “landscapes of the mind.” They present a dark, brooding vision of the tropics, in which narrow gorges and gullies are populated with oversized vegetation and mysterious nocturnal creatures, such as crabs, spiders, frogs and rabbits, and it is impossible not to notice the frequent phallic and vaginal references. Dunkley’s landscapes may seem claustrophobic and impenetrable but their visual density is almost always intersected by winding paths that forcefully guide the eye into the depths of the painting, and into the unknown.

Dunkley was obviously preoccupied with the cycles of life – fertility and mortality – and one major, related theme seems to be the tension between the indomitable forces of nature and humankind’s often-futile efforts to get the upper hand. This may have been influenced by his sojourn in Central America, where he observed one of the most ambitious engineering feats in history, the construction of the Panama Canal, a project that was beset by various calamities and cost some 25,000 human lives, and the development of a major agro-industry, the banana industry, which has always been particularly vulnerable to natural catastrophes. Dunkley was a Freemason and it is possible that Masonic symbolism concerning the journey of life also played a role in his work.

John Dunkley, Diamond Wedding (1940), Collection: National Gallery of Jamaica (Gift of Cassie Dunkley)

Dunkley’s work in the Natural Histories exhibition, Back to Nature (c1939) is one of Dunkley’s few signed paintings and the title is inscribed in the lower right hand corner. Back to Nature is one of two paintings in which he uses the heart shape as a compositional device – the other is Diamond Wedding (1940) – and this creates perhaps the strongest tension between surface pattern and deep, receding perspective seen in Dunkley’s paintings. This visual tension adds to the metaphoric tensions between the carefully manicured landscape and the enormous plants, giant Spanish jars and almost vertiginous illusion of space, in which the two paths along the heart-shape meet and end in what appears to be a gate. In the forefront, there are footprints in the path around the flower bed – the only allusion to a live human presence, but their small size suggests that this human would have been dwarfed by the enormous plants. These footprints may refer to the popular poem A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Voices of the Night, 1838) that is often cited at funerals and in remembrances. Part of it reads:

Lives of great people remind us we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind footprints in the sand of time. Footprints, that perhaps another, sailing o’er life’s solemn main, a forlorn and shipwrecked brother, seeing, shall take heart again.

These references suggest that the heart-shaped bed of flowers in the centre is a grave and the spatial pathways suggested by the work seem to invite us into what lies beyond, as an inevitable destination. Back to Nature is perhaps the clearest illustration of Dunkley’s thematic preoccupation with life and life and death – a reminder that, no matter what our human endeavors, we all go “back to nature” in the end.

Veerle Poupeye

Sources:

• Dunkley, Cassie. “Life of John Dunkley.” In Memorial Anniversary Exhibition of the Late John Dunkley, Artist and Sculptor, n.p. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1948.
• Boxer, David. “Jamaican Art 1922-1982.” In Modern Jamaican Art.  Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle and the University of the West Indies Development and Endowment Fund, 1998.

The book A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica with the Natural History of the Herbs, and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles &c. of the Last of Those Islands (Volume I: 1707, volume II: 1725) provides a remarkable account of the travels and observations made by Sir Hans Sloane  (1660-1753) while he was in Jamaica for fifteen months between 1687 and 1689. Sloane was the founder of the British Museum, which is the model on which our own Institute of Jamaica is  based. Sloane’s life and work provide a rich opportunity to see the overlaps between the slave trade, emergent plantation systems and new scientific knowledge. The son of a colonial official, Sloane was born and raised in  Ireland, and trained in London and France as a physician and botanist.  He eventually established himself as a leading member of British society and academy. In 1719, he became President of the Royal College of Physicians; in 1727, succeeding Isaac Newton, he was elected President of the Royal Society. He also became the preeminent collector of his time, amassing many thousands of books, manuscripts, specimens and objects, gathered by numerous hands from around the world.

Sloane’s visit to Jamaica was an important turning point in his activity as a collector. He came to the island in 1687 as physician to the Duke of Albermarle, the newly appointed governor. He undertook this journey to improve his knowledge of Caribbean species and discover useful and profitable new drugs. Before his departure he had compiled a list of animal and plant specimens required by friends such as the English naturalist John Ray (1627-1705). During the fifteen months he was here he also assembled for himself a fine collection of plants, insects, shells, fish and other specimens.

Traveling to the West Indies was already an established itinerary for naturalists, but the number of specimens Sloane transported (including 800 plants, currently held by London’s Natural History Museum) and the precision of his documentation was unprecedented. Although he never returned to the island, it played a decisive role in his personal and intellectual life thereafter. In 1695 he married the widow of a planter whose plantations brought his family substantial income. He died in 1753, aged 92. In his will he left all his collections to the British nation, provided that the Government would pay £20,000 to his two daughters.  In June 1753 the British Museum Act received Royal Assent from George II, setting up a national museum to house Sloane’s collections and other collections of books and manuscripts.

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Note on the images in Voyages: Sloane commissioned the Dutch-born naturalist artist Everhardus Kickius to make drawings of some of his dried specimens and also used drawings made in Jamaica by the Reverend Garrett Moore of specimens that could not be preserved by drying. These drawings were engraved for the book by Michel Vander Gucht and John Savage.

Everald Brown – Cotton Duppy Tree (1994), mixed media on board, Aaron and Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

The work of self-taught painter and sculptor Everald Brown is best understood in the context of religious Rastafari and African-Jamaican spirituality. Like many other religious Rastafarians, Brother Brown was attracted to the teachings and ritual practices of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and in the early 1960s established the Assembly of the Living, a self-styled mission of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church which was located at 82 ½ Spanish Town Road. The beliefs, ritual practices and symbols of Brother Brown and his church community were however far from “orthodox’” and freely combined elements of religious Rastafari, Freemasonry, Kumina, Revival, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.

This eclectic spirituality is evident throughout Everald Brown’s artistic work, most obviously in those works that depict his own ritual practices and mystical symbols but it is also implied in his landscapes and his depictions of rocks and vegetation. In these works, nature is celebrated for its bountifulness to humankind, as the material incarnation of the divine. Brother Brown’s preoccupation with this theme became more pronounced after he moved his family to Murray Mountain, in the hills of St Ann in 1973. Inspired by the grandiose vistas and suggestive erosions and vegetation of the limestone landscape of central Jamaica, his mystical imagination took full flight, leading to paintings such as Bush Have Ears (1976) that reflect a vision of nature and the land in which everything is imbued with spiritual meaning and ancient truths, to be revealed by the artist-mystic. Brown’s “natural mysticism” is also evident in the later Cotton Duppy Tree (1994), although the ghostly cotton tree in this work is more obviously linked to Jamaican popular culture, in which the cotton tree is seen as a dwelling space for spirits and an “axis mundi” which links the earthly and spiritual realms.

Everald Brown – Bush Have Ears (1976), oil on canvas, 69 x 94.5 cm, Collection: NGJ

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Shoshanna Weinberger – Collection of Strangefruit, gouache & mixed media on paper, 18 panels, ea. 51 x 42 cm

Shoshanna Weinberger’s work takes beauty and sex appeal and turns them on their head. Her swollen, awkward humanoid creatures have all the trappings of beauty- gold chains, stilletos, and curves aplenty- but for all their glamour and glitter they are decidedly ugly, a potent and pungent distillation of stereotypes and female and racial objectification. Her use of grids, and titles like A Collection of Strange Fruit illustrate her interest in scientific discourse, and her own mixed race background fuels a fascination with hybridity.

Weinberger’s titles pack in a good dose of reference, enriching the work. Out of Many‘s reference to Jamaica’s national motto adds a new dimension to that work. Similarly, A Collection of Strange Fruit makes an interesting reference to the song Strange Fruit (most famously performed by American jazz songstress Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939). The song was written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem. It exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans whose corpses are the macabre ”strange fruit” referenced in the title.

Shoshanna Weinberger – Out of Many, One (2013), gouache and mixed media on paper, 24 panels, ea. 52 x 40 cm

In an article looking at the work of Weinberger and Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, Jared Richardson offers the following reading: ”In their efforts to speculate a fantastic black female body, Mutu and Weinberger take the terrors of a racist history and amplify them to a mutant proportion, suggesting an alternate psychology to our current place and time. Such bodily magnitude disregards our understanding of biological evolution and conflates racial fear with sensual fascination. […] In the gouache creations of Weinberger, Hottentots toddle around as essentialized hunks of breasts and buttocks. The oeuvre of these two artists envision alterity as it relates to hybrid corporeality, race, and gender…”.  (”Attack of the Boogeywoman: Visualizing Black Women’s Grotesquerie in Afrofuturism”, Art Papers November/December 2012 issue)

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Hope Brooks’ Slavery Trilogy is a combination of three series: (from left to right) Kings and Princes, Backra Pickney and Trilogy. The work explores the history and development of racial identities, imposed and self-chosen, in the context of the African Diaspora. Originally the artist presented the work with extended text labels that provided extensive reference material about the slave trade and the experience of the enslaved as well as the verbal vocabulary that evolved from this context. Of particular interest is a list of ethnic slurs taken from Wikipedia, one for each letter of the alphabet.

The grid installation and repetition of the work with its subtle variations in facial expression and colour spectrum also recall the Casta paintings of colonial Latin America. Casta is the origin of the English word “caste”, the paintings were common in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in Mexico, where they were used to depict and classify the various racial categories and mixtures. Casta paintings were not merely artistic exploration, they shaped people’s social experience significantly. The racial groupings they depicted had an accompanying set of privileges and restrictions, both legal and customary.

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Anonymous – Las castas (18th century), oil on canvas, 148×104 cm, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

Esther Chin’s Yisitie though apparently simple, has a number of possible readings. In her artist statement, she describes her use of petals in the work as “part of a post modern language which helps to develop different visual claims.” Such claims may reference the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1960’s which sought to challenge Western art history’s masculinist and culturally prejudiced distinction between craft and fine art (among other things).

The work also seems to be an exploration of the artist’s Chinese-Jamaican heritage. This is most strongly indexed in the work’s title which is the Pinyin translation of her name, Esther. The fact that the petals are from the bougainvillea flower is also significant. The plant is endemic to Jamaica and known for its beauty and hardiness, particularly in times of drought. It is also significant in China where it is the official flower of a number of cities in the Guangdong Province (the part of China where many Chinese Jamaican families originate).

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