#sexypink/oil painting

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SEXYPINK Reviews: I went for a drive and Never Came Back - Tracey Johnson

(Solo show) LOFTT Gallery Roselino Street Woodbrook

October 6 -20th 2023

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A ditty of Bruce Springsteen and the title of a recently completed Solo show by the prolific Tracey Johnson at Loftt in Woodbrook discusses a restless spirit. Springsteen croons ‘ride, and never went back, Johnson, ‘drive, and Never Came Back’.

Whatever the lyrics Miss Johnson has single handedly shown why going to Art shows matter. Her Hyper Realistic, Expressionistic Abstractions are thought provoking masterful works. 

Her technical skills are so on point that as you stand next to her girl smiling or red devil, it takes a few seconds for ones thoughts to wrap around the fact that these ARE NOT photographs.

Even more so, her decision to deliberately toy with reality by blurring, marking and splattering heightens the delightful drama on the canvases.

For example her egg drop sun and black drizzle over the La Basse image could be gimmicky in any other hands.

Miss Johnson triumphs here by instinctively being in synch with every single brush stroke she renders. She gives just enough shift from Realism to Fantasy as can be seen in Maracas beach where her sun is a child’s playful scrawl.

What I appreciate most about I went for a drive and Never Came Back is its unexpected candor on life in the tropical paradise that is Trinidad and Tobago.

Overlaying frenetic markings on captured moments, defining the happenstance of one’s input like a diary or a witness to the mundane (beauty) likened to the simplicity of  driving on a dark night - is all done with an ease, an exceptional understanding of painting. It is a comprehension fraught with the discipline of getting out of the way and letting the energy come forward as she does - not simple or easy at all.

Everybody has a hungry heart, Springsteen sings and Miss Johnson’s heart beats for us in her work. One of the most impactful shows of 2023 so far. 

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Sexypink - major browny points!

Sexypink/ Jamaican Oil Painter Alicia Brown.

Alicia Brown’s candid imagery is so very watchable and provocative. - Sexypink

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Sexypink - Aurora Honeywell

When I come across work I have not seen before, and it causes me to pause, it is always a special feeling and moment. I look forward to more.

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Sexypink - Subran remembers the old time days.

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Sexypink - Ashley Thomas-Steuart at Soft Box Art Gallery now.

"I would tell you how much I love you if I could only quantify it myself”

28"×22" oil on canvas

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“Embers” oil on canvas

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“This is no ThroneI wear no Crown” 48”x36” oil on canvas 

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“Exit Stage Left”  oil on canvas

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and a detail.

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Sexypink - JACQUELINE BISHOP, writer and visual artist, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and who now lives and works in New York City. She has held several Fulbright Fellowships, and exhibited her work widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She is also an Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University.

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked. In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman—centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards—and placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica. For that same reason, British Art Studies is a fitting venue for their first ever publication and partner to create an accompanying film exploring the plates and their themes.

Though the likenesses of none of the women in my family are represented in this series, centering the market woman is my way of paying homage to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker, who I grew up knowing very well, and who was a market woman/huckster/milkwoman par excellence. Celeste was born in the tiny district of Nonsuch hidden high in the Blue Mountains in Portland Parish on the island of Jamaica. Her mother died on the way home from a market, when my great-grandmother was too young to even remember her face. In her adulthood, while my great-grandfather farmed the land, my great-grandmother was the huckster who could easily carry bunches of bananas and baskets of food on her head; the market woman who travelled to far away Kingston to sell in Coronation Market, the largest market on the island. She also hawked fresh fish, and prepared and sold coconut oil, ginger beer, cut flowers, and cocoa beans that were pounded in a heavy wooden mortar. I remember her in my childhood as the milkwoman waking very early in the morning and walking through the district selling fresh cow’s milk. The tradition of huckstering would be passed on to my grandmother who relished the role in her older years. My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaican and Caribbean societies.

My work integrates the mediums of painting, drawing and photography to explore issues of home, ancestry, family, connectivity and belonging. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.

Oftentimes I utilize a process of competing narratives to have the viewer participate in the creation of meaning. In my “Folly” series I recount a story I heard as a child, of two tales of a “haunted” house. In time, I researched the history of the house and through a process of photomontage combined photographs I took with archival footage to try and tell the two stories. The ghostly images of the past occupants are integrated into the walls and on the grounds of the present-day ruins. The overall effect is spectral and haunting. I also used this process of photomontage in an ongoing series of ethereal and transcendent “Childhood Memories,” in which characters are often split between heaven and earth. There is a palpable sense of loss in these images as characters seek to inhabit a time and a place long gone.

The “Babylon” and “Zion” paintings are about the Rastafarian ideas of Babylon being a place of captivity and oppression while Zion symbolizes a utopian place of unity and peace. In the Babylon series, I write the lyrics from songs and poems to create text-based drip paintings leading up to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in which I use popular dancehall posters to evoke the inner-city Babylonian “walls” of Kingston. The Zion series is comprised largely of monochrome paintings to delineate this symbolic paradise. Glitter is present in these works not only as a representation of the paradise that Rastafarians seek in the Biblical homeland of Zion but also as a commentary on the ‘bling and glitter’ culture that has enveloped much of Jamaican society. Consequently, my work is very much engaged with helping me to understand my heritage.

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Back Room Bertha 2008 10 x 10 inches Oil on linen

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Sexypink - A gem of an article on an exceptional body of work by Jamaican Artist Roberta Stoddart.

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~Sexypink~  HazBat .2020. Roberta Stoddart . Oil paint on primed hardboard and stretcher bar. 9 x 6” . Part of the Exhibition RAW; the space in between . Special viewing this Saturday 8.8.2020

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Our great artist Lisa O’Connor, who died in 2020, had a large stock of artist’s material in her home when she passed. Her family have generously placed all this (paints, stretched canvases, paint brushes etc etc) at 101, for young upcoming artists to take away, free of charge, anything they make good use of, in her memory.101 is open Saturday and Sunday 10am to 4pm. 628-4081

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~Sexypink~ September shall begin with a first solo from Artist Brian Ashing.  There are an extremely small number of Artists working in oil in Trinidad and Tobago. His choice is thus a treat to be able to see close up. Do save the date.

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~SEXYPINK’s top 10 breakout Artists for the decade (2010-2019) When I first saw the work of both Roberta Stoddart and Leasho Johnson I got a fever. It was one of those heart racing, dry mouth moments where you want to see everything they have ever done.

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~Sexypink~ Congratulations to  Catapult Consultancy Voucher Winners - view a few of them here-:

Richard Nattoo is an illustrator and fine artist born in St. Catherine Jamaica. He graduated from the University of Technology where he received a BA in Architecture. Richard’s work has been featured in several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions as well as solo exhibits. He has garnered much acclaim for his surreal dreamlike creations that explore human emotions on a raw cerebral level.

Born in 1958, Alwyn St. Omer is the fourth child in a family of nine. His Mother Cynthia was a personal assistant in the Prime Minister’s office and his father the late Hon. Sir Dunstan St. Omer, a widely acclaimed international artist of Saint Lucian origins.

As a child, Alwyn was inspired by the plentiful supply of picture books around the house, which served to motivate him to draw and paint pictures. Also, at about age six he was introduced to Illustrated Classics and Marvel Comics, which stimulated his appetite, not only for graphic designs, but also for fairytales and storytelling in a pictorial format. Growing up in an artistic environment provided stimulus. Alwyn as a young inspiring artist was privileged to witness plays performed by the famous local company—Saint Lucia Arts Guild—adding a dimension of realism to what he saw and read on the page. He was enamoured by plays steeped in the island’s rich folk and musical traditions that included some of the early works of the island’s Nobel Laureate, poet Derek Walcott and his playwright twin brother Roderick.

It is from this launching pad that Alwyn, the artist and storyteller was thrust into orbit, a creative artist with very deep passion and lifelong desire to document his island’s cultural heritage through his drawings and paintings. For him rediscovery and preservation of all the treasures forming the formidable expanse loosely termed the Saint Lucian Environment, History, Culture and Folklore would be his life’s achievement. Its art, myths, writings and traditions.

Alwyn studied Art at the Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts in Jamaica and Video Production and Audio Visuals at Portsmouth College in England. Alwyn is a master draughtsman and colorist defining and refining images in a style that is uniquely his own. His work is numerous including paintings in Acrylics and oil on canvas, Pen and ink illustrations and wall murals. Of note are his Design of St Lucia’s National Independence Monument, the Semi Dome Mural in the ceiling of the ancient River Doree Anglican Church in Choiseul, the Castries City Council commissioned outdoor murals at Faux- a-Chaud on the outskirts of the city, his Moon Dancer Series of abstract Paintings based on the lost Masquerade Tradition of St Lucia and Soucoyan, a Graphic Novel on St Lucian Folktales.

Rhonda Chan Soo is a Trinidadian documentary filmmaker. She earned merit-based scholarships which allowed her to pursue her tertiary studies in the US, where various threads interwove into her pursuit of a career in documentary film. She has been the Managing Director of Bird’s Eye View Productions since 2018, and has kept the social issue tradition of the company alive, further moulding it with her creative voice. Informed by empathy, a desire for justice and equality, and a critical practice that acknowledges her own positionality as a POC woman from the Global South, Rhonda is interested in exploring social issues, environment and culture.

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Roberta Stoddart

~Sexypink~ From the show RAW right now in Trinidad and Tobago..... Steppin’ Out.2020. Roberta Stoddart . Oil paint on primed hardboard and stretcher bar. 9 x 6”

and  His Excellency Grand General Chairman Corona . 2020. Roberta Stoddart . Oil paint on primed hardboard and stretcher bar. 9 x 6” . Part of RAW.

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Sonya Sanchez Arias .EMPTY SPACES Mixed Media Assemblage 90" x 22" x 7" (Urban angel #1)

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SHALINI. A Sense if their Existence. 18 x 14”

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“When the presence of other people begins to fade, as it did during this period, your own pulse becomes louder”- Che Lovelace . Portrait with Capuchin Monkeys. Che Lovelace . Assorted pigment on board. 25 x 30”. 

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Serenity Prayer . Susan Dayal . 18 - 22 gauge galvanised wire, nylon fishing line, bamboo. “ Lord, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” 2020 began with a sense of foreboding. For 12 years, I have listened to my husband espousing collapse propaganda, leaving me depressed and anxious. Driven to “do something” I spent the Carnival weekend creating a food garden. 2 weeks later, it all made sense as COVID 19 started spreading across the globe towards us like a slow motion trainwreck. During the lockdown, working in my garden, with all its triumphs and failures, kept me sane.” - Susan Dayal . Part of the exhibition- RAW

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Dean Arlen . Raw-men. Paper, wood glue, spray enamel, oil paint, epoxy, acrylic paint . 60 x 60”. “Exploring RAW – NESS - conjures the primal instinctive savagery in making. How far can savagery survive in this modern economy, what are the limitations, the editorial conversation in containing the line, texture, temperament – the pure elements that start the blocks that build into the constructive language – of contemporary of art –“ - Dean Arlen .

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~Sexypink~ Love letter to the Late Lisa O’Connor from The Women in Art Organization of Trinidad and Tobago

 LISA OCONNOR 27 May , 1965 - 22 June ,2020 Dear Lisa , I looked around the gallery today at walls that for years were full of your masterpieces .As the last of your paintings left , there was a profound emptiness inside of me at the realization that these walls would no longer hold anymore of your new works. I will so miss your vivid colors , the incredible light that each piece evokes , you created such a happy mood within each piece . As for that immense strong smell of still wet oil paints of pieces recently off your easel and along came a warning how careful I must be. A sadness hit - there would be no more phone calls - “ I’m finally finished it , it just needs to be photographed and then you can come for it !” That love and passion in your voice for each piece that you mastered. There will be no more lengthy chats , discussions and endless negotiations . You were always relentlessly strong yet you held a sincere kindness within you. Your humility , your gentle soul and the pride in your voice each and every time we spoke and the excitement that was always shared upon completion of a work. You painted what you saw , exactly what you saw. I can still picture you with your easel inside the Savannah and Jackson Square. I admired how you always put your family first and what an incredible love you had for your children. You worked only when you had finished everything that life threw at you. Last week , one of your last messages to me - “Juliana , I have a surprise for you ! I was working on the painting for you ! “ How I know how you struggled to paint towards the very end . I saw how weary you grew but there was such a fierce determination and hope inside of you. You so fought hard to live ! You continued to be so positive right until the very end and carried an intense spirituality that I would one day only hope to have. God was always mentioned every time we spoke. You were all heart Lisa , you are so going to be missed ! Throughout the years , I noticed how willing you always were to please your collectors , to give them the very best of you. You remained so utterly passionate about each subject . Each piece not only told a story but showed what an incredible person you were and how you viewed the world with such love and compassion. Each creation came from within your heart. You now live in each one of us , you are part of our walls , our homes , our lives. We , the collectors are the lucky ones . We hold a part of your life and who you were. Lisa , did you know how many countless times , numerous collectors have said to me how after a long , tedious day at work or just the regular struggles of daily life they would come home , sit and just simply stare and lose themselves in the beauty of what hangs on their walls ? You have made such a tremendous mark and impact in the world in such a short lifetime. Edvard Munch quoted - “ Nature is not only that is visible to the eye . It also includes the inner pictures of the soul “- for every brilliant yellow poui, fierce orange flamboyant , bougainvillea , humble fishing village , magnificent colonial building and lush garden, I will always remember your unique being. Your beauty certainly came from within your very nature and soul. Love , Juliana . “ There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot , but there are others who , thanks to their art and intelligence , transform a yellow spot into the sun . “ Pablo Picasso .

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~Sexypink~ From the Facebook page of Jal Khan....

Went to the current must go to see and buy art exibition in Trinidad and Tobago by local artist Marissa Yung Lee at Horizons Art Gallery.It is a refreshing exibition from the local norm of technical painting of subjects of portraiture studies, fantasy and Trinidad and Tobago cultural diversity coding. She presents subjects from Trinidad and Tobago traditional Carnival to our cultural diversity to the artist fantasy linking to the exibition theme of magical=realism.

What Young Lee brings to the viewing audience is her investigation of the skill of painting the human form, costume and control of light on the subject using different oil painting medium methods.Her works are very reasonably priced even below some local market rates for this type of technical painting which as her first solo exibition are expected only increase significantly. I expect her growth and skill as an visual artist to rapidly advance as she explores her visual voice to speak and share with us.

Congratulations to her as most of her works have already been sold and it's up to you to quickly get the remaining available ones of this progressive artist for your art collection.What look for in this artist?Her investigation of light in paintings.Her subject choices and tight compositions that are linked to and rich in Trinidad and Tobago cultural diversity symbolic encoding.

The artist willingness to investigate and experiment to commit to this form of painting.The possibility of her future deeper exploration of her minds visual creative expression of her subject choices using her developing mastery of the media.

Recommendations Go see this exibition.Support buying local art for love of art and investment in art.Follow and support all local visual artist.

Credits acknowledgmentsArtist Marissa Yung LeeHorizons Art GalleryPhotography by Jalaludin Khan © 2021