Caribbean Artists A-Z

Born in 1913, Abrahams like so many schoolboys took up caricaturing his schoolmasters while in his teens at Calabar College. Similarly, he applied his skills to drawing automobiles (the rage of that era) and emulated his father who also created car designs. It was a schoolboy talent that he was reluctant to outgrow and encouraged by his headmaster Rev. Ernest Price he began copying old master paintings as well as documenting local Jamaican scenes. In addition, he became fascinated with…

Stanley Barnes’ talent as a painter was recognised quickly at the Jamaica School of Art, but, as painting tutor Kofi Kayiga noted in his term report, his progress was marred by a tendency to be mischevious and an arrogance that made him unwilling to conform or comply with regular attendence at classes. His dismissive approach to formal tuition seemed not to harm his artistic development. Even before Stanley Barnes had graduated his work was shown in a travelling exhibition of Jamaican art to…

Everald Brown's art and spirituality are intricately bound together. His painting, sculptures and patterned musical instruments, become more vivid as his understanding of his environment, the world and his place in the universe matures. His complex spiritual beliefs that come from a Baptist upbringing and his rastafarian faith, are reflected in imagery full of biblical references, signs, symbols and historical anecdotes. Now into his eighties, the wisdom and…

Stan Burnside received his BFA and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1970s he worked in the United States painting and designing album covers for notable R&B artists. After returning to the Bahamas, he distinguished himself as an art teacher at the College of The Bahamas, as a cartoonist with SideBurns commentary, as a principle designer for the Saxon Superstars and later the One Family Junkanoo groups, and as a founder and co-creator of the artist collectives B-CAUSE and…

Eric Cadien attended the ‘art school’ during the dynamic seventies when self- reliance and self-determination became the political watch-words that guided Jamaica beyond independence towards self-government and Democratic Socialism. At the Jamaica School of Art Jerry Craig and Hope Brooks taught him, but his earliest influences in terms of style and technical development came from artists such as Winston Patrick and Osmond Watson and Kofi Kayiga. He was initially trained as a sculptor but…

The development of Ralph Campbell’s career as a painter parallels similar developments in Jamaica’s modern art history. It is not surprising that his maturation as a painter mirrors the same process of maturation in Jamaica’s cultural institutions, since a great deal of his artistic achievements were due to their foundation. In his lifetime as an artist he experienced the birth of Jamaican art as well as its rise to public acclaim.

Initially attending the informal Saturday…

Eddie Chambers is an artist, curator, teacher and a writer of art criticism. He was born in Wolverhampton, England and gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Sunderland Polytechnic in 1983. He now holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, awarded in 1998, for his thesis researching press and public responses to Black visual arts practice in England in the 1980s. Chambers began organising exhibitions while still a student. Since then, he has curated a large number of exhibitions in Britain and…

The 1999 Peers Awards Nomination for Creative Director of the Year, was a significant milestone in the career of Patrick Champagnie: a career which began while he was still a student at Calabar High School, and developed  through  experience in modern techniques of television, radio and print advertising at Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising in New York…