Spiritual Yards: Home Ground of Jamaica’s Intuitives – Selections from the Wayne and Myrene Cox Collection, opens on December 11. Here is a post on two more of the artists in the exhibition, along with video footage, courtesy of Wayne Cox.
Leonard Daley (c1930-2006) was born in St Catherine. He moved Kingston where he became a part of the urban Rastafari movement. Later in life, he moved back to the hills of St Catherine residing in Wakefield. He worked at a number of jobs including as a cook and a taxi-driver. The paintings of Daley have been dated to as early as the late 1970s, although it is speculated that he may have been producing paintings from much earlier. Daley’s imagery involved a high degree of surrealism that featured densely packed and multi-layered compositions of ghoulish figures and faces, animals and text. He worked on a variety of discarded materials including plywood, hardboard, metal drum lids, pieces of tarpaulin and even shredded canvas. Daley described his artistic process as an automatic response to his own meditations and thoughts, “I close my eyes and I pray a lot. Sometimes tears fall down…Sometimes I sit down and look at the plain wall, and I can’t penetrate it. And so I will use some water in my mouth, and spew it on the wall, and whatever way it dries it comes out as a picture.” Daley participated in many local and international exhibitions, including Fifteen Intuitives (1987) at the National Gallery of Jamaica and New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art (1995) at the Hayward Gallery, London. He is well represented in a number of private and public collections internationally and locally, including the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica. In 2002, he was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal for Art by the Institute of Jamaica.
William “Woody” Joseph (1919-1998) was born in Castleton, St Mary. At some point in his life, he moved to Stony Hill, St Andrew, where he lived for a while until he built his house in Castleton. He began carving around 1963. One narrative states that he was inspired to carve when he went to a river to heal an injured leg and saw a stick floating in it. He took it as a sign that if he carved the stick, it would assist the healing. From then on, Woody viewed carving as a spiritual service or in his words “capture the heart of justice.” His anthropomorphic and zoomorphic wooden forms were reminiscent of similar forms in African and Taino traditions and demonstrate an imagination that was deeply tied to nature and the spiritual realm. Woody began exhibiting his sculptures sometime around the late 1970s. Notable local and international exhibitions include the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Intuitives series and Redemption Songs: The Self-Taught Artists of Jamaica (1997) organized by the Diggs Gallery, USA. He was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica in 1988.
National Gallery of Jamaica 