#sexypink/self portraiture

[sexypinkon]

Sexypink - Jamaican Artist Marisa Willoughby-Holland deserves an encore.

Sexypink - Marisa Willoughby-Holland.

Sexypink - Jamaican Artist abroad.

Sexypink

[galleryyuhself]

Sexypink - A huge loss to Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you Geoffrey for your vision, kindness and love.

..............................

Geoffrey's contribution to Art history. He was the definitive writer on Cazabon.

An image of one of Cazabon's paintings.

Finally, a beautiful tribute to Geoffrey MacLean from one of many friends.

.................................

TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY MACLEAN. In each island nation of the Eastern Caribbean, economies of scale make it so that there are only one or two (and if they are lucky, three or four) local experts in some field of study which has little to do with industry or clerical work but everything to do with the national character and its history. Because they are often without precedent, these experts often have had to travel abroad for their training or are otherwise self-trained in their chosen sector of the liberal arts/humanities/social sciences.

Trained architect and avocational art historian Geoffrey MacLean was one of these indispensable sages in the field of visual studies and the built environment. He was the world’s foremost specialist on nineteenth-century landscape and genre painter Michel Jean Cazabon. Cazabon was a partially unwitting member of a global late colonial/early post-colonial landscape painting tradition that encompassed artists such as Mexican José María Velasco, the Chartrand brothers of Cuba, Filipino painter Fernando Amorsolo, and the painters of the Hudson River School in the United States. What all of these artists had in common was their urgent need to capture and pay tribute for posterity to the natural beauty of their respective lands before that “Edenic” verdure was despoiled by then-already encroaching industrialization.

MacLean’s passion for Cazabon pressed him not only to hone further the scholastic abilities he had already developed at Presentation College in his native Trinidad and Bristol University in the U.K. but to travel back and forth between the Caribbean and Europe hunting down examples and collections of Cazabon’s work. He also assisted the government of the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago in the acquisition of some Cazabon works for display in its National Museum and Art Gallery.

MacLean was generous with his knowledge, his time, and with his published materials. Every time I visited him, I came home with an armful of books and catalogues (one of my favorites is an unassuming little pamphlet of a catalogue called Chinese Artists of Trinidad & Tobago which probably played some part in my decision to write the book about Sybil Atteck on which I am currently working with Sybil’s nephew Keith). In graduate school, I relied heavily on MacLean’s Cazabon books for the research I was doing on colonial Latin American and Caribbean painting. MacLean’s enthusiasm for Cazabon’s genre painting, especially his rapt verbal and written descriptions of the late 19th century painting Negress in Gala Dress (pictured here) revealed to me that Cazabon’s paintings of local “types” (e.g., “Negress” instead of named individual) was sometimes a form of real portraiture and thus departed the tipo de país-to-costumbrismo continuum that we sometimes use in Latin American art history. Cazabon loved his people too much and included too much implied biography and other narratives in those paintings, to reduce their subjects to mere “types.” His titles were thus deceptively taxonomic.

Architect, scholar, art gallery director Geoffrey MacLean’s contribution to the study and preservation of T&T’s architecture was legendary even before his passing. He has searched out original plans for fretwork houses and saved some of these architectural jewels from the bulldozers of “developers.” He has done the same for members of the Magnificent Seven around the Queen’s Park Savannah and taught workshops on both the civic and residential architecture of Trinidad & Tobago. As MacLean himself now passes into legend, we are left with the perennial question in these small and mid-sized islands of the Eastern Caribbean each with their two or three experts on local art and architecture – who will pick up the torch?

~ Lawrence Waldron

[sexypinkon]

Sexypink - Demosthene mystifies.

M Florine Demosthene

A closer look.

[sexypinkon]

Sexypink - Aurora Honeywell - The Fall

Aurora Honeywell- detail

Sexypink - Aurora Honeywell- Writing on The Fall

Sexypink - Aurora Honeywell - detail

Sexypink - Aurora Honeywell- I am She - 36” x 36 “

[sexypinkon]

Sexypink - Studio Zano’s portrait workshop - save the date.

[sexypinkon]

Sexypink - Bony Ramirez - Dominican Republic - Shows on now in New York

[sexypinkon]

                                  S    E    X    Y    P    I    N    K

                      From the Facebook page of Brian Ashing

Hi everyone. Sharing some of my recent portrait paintings. Feel free to contact me or share this post with someone you think may be interested in commissioning a portrait of themselves or a loved one. You can always reach me at 1-868-779-0005 (telephone or WhatsApp) or brianashingart@gmail.com 

[sexypinkon]

~Sexypink~ Tessa Mars, Haitian Art at its best.