“The space that I grew up in was a creative space. My mother was a seamstress. She was a dressmaker. My father was a cabinetmaker. So I was very much accustomed to people taking raw materials and creating something beautiful at the end of the day. That was not an uncommon thing in terms of my early exposure. I had no choice, my father required me to go and be a part of it and learn. So it's not just the woodworking. I grew up in rural St. Mary in Highgate so most of what I played with I had to make. So if you wanted to play with a gig or what you would call a top, you would have to take a machete, go get a piece of stick, and you would have to use great skill and dexterity to shape that thing to make sure that it's symmetrical and it functions how it's supposed to function. And use broken glass to shave it down. We had to make our kites. We had to make most of what we played with. I think what my early years did for me was it helped me to figure out how to problem solve relative to executing. And I think because I was so compelled to practice and to achieve, I always had this dream in my head that I'm gonna make this thing and it's gonna be so real, it's gonna blow your mind, or it's gonna be so perfect. And so I chased that utopia of perfection, manifested in an artwork, and that caused me to practice, practice, practice. Oh, that's not looking like what I'm dreaming of. So I was a loose cannon. You couldn't get my attention in math class. You certainly couldn't get it in history, nor could you get it in Spanish. None of those subjects that required heavy recall, you couldn't get my attention. But once I got an opportunity t.o solve a problem or to create something that satisfies the ambition of the mind, I would excel. It's just that I figured out how to take that kind of attitude and introspective learning and plug it into theory and content later on in my life.”

Shun Lawton | Policy Maker, Formal Educator; (Ministry of Education SR Visual Arts Officer)

 

​

 

I learned [how to weave]from my family. From mom, to daughter, to I. I think there's an old saying that you normally pick up what your parents do. So [I was] always around her and tying up stuff. 

I lived in a small district known as cottage in New Roads Leamington division of Westmoreland. Every household [within] 5-10 miles around that area could have wove back in the late 50s, early 80s. Then there was a decline and now within my community you can find maybe 0.something percent. And I am one of maybe 3 persons really pushing it to the level where it is now.

​

I can recall maybe age six or age seven, as a child we usually make our own toys and I remember a shopkeeper in our area brought down toys from Kingston. Its not like now where you can get toys just around the corner. So what we do, we normally made our toys. And I saw a particular toy I did want. I was tying up some stuff, and the real reason why I say tying up [when now] Im saying weaving [is] as a child I didnt know. So I was weaving [what] ended up being a coaster. At the time I didn't know what I was making. I'm just making something. And she took it to the market and I get a pay day. So that get me started. But over time [it] became a habit. Where I can earn my own money. So I keep doing that and that also helped me in order to go to school. It's a difficult skill. It's something now that's not doing as well. Its something you have to grow to love. At first it wasn't a craft that I loved. Even though I was able to gain a little bit [from] it. There are disrespectful ways surrounding it where people look down on it. Its when I got older, I realized its a lack of understanding. At that time it was something that I was ashamed of. 

Omar Daley | CEO Last Straw (Artesian, Informal Educator)

​​

​

​

“I come from a family of creatives. My grandfather was a master cabinetmaker. My mom sews, my aunt sews, one of my uncles is a master tailor. And so for me, I found I was always surrounded by people who were creatives. As I grew older, I was able to recognize, through formal education, that what I loved was art. It was a space of solace. It's something that I found was calming, was reflective. I'm the second. I'm an only girl. And a lot of times this was my time with me. I understood and appreciated being alone…I used to love just making things. In Jamaica we have a thing where you use juice boxes to make little trucks. And so I'd use that to make little wardrobes for my dolls. I learned to sew really early. And I loved using the scraps of fabric that would hang around when my aunties would be finished sewing and just making stuff. I was later in spaces where I met other more prominent and formally trained individuals who were artists and fell in love with this way of being even more. And so for me, it was the only thing I actually saw myself doing. Earlier on, what we define now as fiber art, that was already in the making with me, quite intuitively, without even questioning what it was. And I remember thinking and dreaming, Oh, yes, I was going to be the next fashion designer. I loved experimenting with colors. I loved playing with colors.”                                   Miriam Hinds Smith | Formal Educator, Artist, Policy Maker; (Fiber and Textile artist, Director of The School of Visual Arts EMCVPA)

 

​

​

“My first memory of art, well my mum's an artist. She works primarily with ceramics but also sculpture and drawing. And my grandmother, her mother, was also an artist. So I think my first memory would be these activities that I would be doing with my mum where it didn't actually feel formalized in any way, but it was play, and it was creative play. Recently I've been reflecting that storytelling was a big part of my childhood in terms of the circle of friends that my mom had around. And she had one friend in particular who is a professional storyteller. She would gather people and sit and just tell these incredible mythologies and different stories from all different cultures. And that process of just sitting and listening and building these whole worlds and images in my own mind, I recognize that now as an art form that I was very, very much drawn to and something that I think has continued to inspire me. But I think generally a lot of the activities that I did as a child, from a very young age, which were all around this idea of play, but it was creative play, came from my mom.”

Ania Freer | Artist, Sales Platform; (Film maker)

 

​

​

“[My first memory of art was] my mother had a piece of art hanging on the wall in her home. There's a black & white photograph, a man in a trench coat, flashing a sculpture. And it had some text under it that said, ‘Expose yourself to art.’"                                                                                                      Jonathan Lamb | Artist, Curator, Collector, American Investor (Spray Painter, Founder Touch Up JA)

 

​

​

“My mom, she always had wanted to go to Edna Manley to study ceramics or to study  art in general. But her parents couldn't afford it. So when she migrated to Toronto, there's a lot of options, a lot of classes, a lot of institutions that have classes for ceramics. So she joined and that's how she caught on. I left home at about 16 and going back and visiting her, I couldn't believe that she was still into the whole clay thing. It was actually when she was on the verge of moving home, I learned that she was making products in Toronto and shipping them here to Jamaica. And she was making for persons she worked with and she would keep ceramic shows in Toronto. She would make stuff and then have a nice display at the house and invite friends and neighbors in the area. Mind you, she worked for the Toronto Hilton, the airport Hilton, for like 30 odd years, but she still loved to be in the clay. And that's how I got into it. It's very mystical. I'm not a perfect child or anything like that and I need[ed] a place to lay low. ‘I'm just gonna hang out by you for a while.’ Doing that, then I learned that she was still doing it. And the more and more I asked questions, I found out [what] she was doing. She was actually teaching evening classes maybe two times a week at a Golden Age [Home] on the Lakeshore Boulevard, and evening time she'd go down keep the classes and after classes she would produce.  She'd be making to ship home for Christmas, because Christmas is when persons like to spruce up their house, change the look. One thing with Jamaicans, I found this out coming home, is that they  really love ceramics. They love figurines. They love to fix up the place when it comes to Christmas. When she was teaching me it was actually a new beginning for me. I was actually taking it seriously. When I reached home, she was shipping stuff in November to be here for Christmas. It roughly takes about three to four weeks, sometimes six weeks, for barrels to reach here. So she was shipping them in barrels. The barrels got here, I got here, and the first sale blew my mind. I have two aunts who 20 years ago were selling downtown on Princess Street, Berry Street, places at Christmas where it's always busy, Grand Market stuff like that. In Jamaica we call them Higglers. And about five of them visited us at the guest house up in Red Hills and it's the fastest I saw five barrels empty out [all with] ceramic goods. That made me realize that there's an avenue here for me. I'm serious in anything I do, so I know once I come home, I will make something of it. That was it. From there, Mom was the one that inspired me and showed me that something could happen here.”                                       Garfield Williams | Craft Artisan, Investor; (Founder, Trench Town Ceramics)

 

​​

​

“My first experience with art that I can remember was my mother had a gallery. And I was in secondary school, early teen. And we worked there in the summers and the holidays. And there was a painting by Carl Abrahams that came in of Moses coming down the mountain. And it was windswept…holding the tablets and it was a really strong piece. He did a lot of religious imagery at that time. And at that time, I was going through my own religious thinking or outside the box questioning. And that painting came in and I had that urge of like, ‘We can't sell this’. As a gallery, it was coming in to go on the walls. And I begged my parents, ‘Can we keep it? Can it go into the family collection?’ My parents had started collecting at that point.”                                                        Susanne Fredricks | Curator, Collector, Investor; (Director, Suzie Wong Presents)

 

​

​​

​

“I grew up in a town called Gordon Town above the hills of Kingston, in the hills of Kingston. My mother was Linda Gambrill, and she started a co-op called Beanybud. It basically was working with women from the community who were basket weavers, but also seamstresses and so on. And she had a craft line, including baskets, including things like packaging spices, including a doll called Beanybud. And in fact, she wrote three children's stories with a character called Beanybud. And she eventually moved the business into Liguanea. And this is in the 1970s. And she, at one point, was probably one of the only people that exported baskets from Jamaica. These are hamper baskets, made with hook. She exported them to Louisiana. And then that whole thing fell apart for many reasons, one of which was in the 1980s, the government opened up a lot of our export and import restrictions, import restrictions mainly. And we had a lot of Asian goods flood the market and that basically killed our craft industry. So her business closed.

 

My mom always loved Jamaican art. My mom was very sick very early on when she had lupus. And she studied for a while with Ras Dizzy, who's a very well-known intuitive artist in Jamaica. She started painting with him. And it was a slightly weird combination because he's really very talented, but he's a bit out there. And there was this little white girl from Jamaica learning with Ras Dizzy. So kudos to her really that she was so open-minded and so interested in Jamaican art. I grew up in a house with Kapos and Huies and Colin Garland and that's what she believed in investing in was Jamaican art. So that's really my foundation. And then also growing up with her business which was basically an adjunct to her house up in Gordon Town with the smell of straw, it was just one of my earliest memories, straw, cloth, those kinds of things.                                                                     Ashley Rousseau | Craft Artisan, Curator, Collector, Investor (Beanybud, “Purveyors of Fine Craft”) 

 

​

“…My mother went to the Beaux Arts in Grenoble. She did three years. She never did get a certificate or anything like that. She left too quickly. But she did have three years of very intense training……Mom came to Jamaica from art school, married my dad, and he was a developer. And she just ended up drawing buildings for him and drafting. And the architectural association wanted to ban her because she wasn't properly trained and all of this. She had architectural drawings up the ying yang. But she did illustration and she encouraged me. And I was given this [childrens book] commission and I just did the drawings. She would have shown me books, children's books, as I was growing, or given me her old children's books, Grimm's Fairy Tales with beautiful illustrations in them."                 Laura Facey | Artist, Informal Teacher, Investor (Sculptor)

 

​

“My mother and my parents were collectors. And my mother would drag me to the National Gallery of Art. And this was when it was at Devon House. And I used to hate it. I would go and sit for hours and look at things, and it was painful, until I fell in love with a painting. And it was Colin Garland's ‘Caribbean Sea’. It's a triptych. And, you know, he's very mystical, spiritual and so forth, which I knew nothing about as a child. But just the imagery in there, things that I could recognize, things I didn't understand, in the blue, beautiful Caribbean Sea, you know, there's a policeman, there's a seahorse, there's a woman. And it's riveting, and there was so much information in the painting. So whenever we would go, I would always focus on that particular painting. And then I remember one day going there and seeing Dr. David Boxer, who was the Curator for the National Collection. And seeing him open the door of a side office and peer out. And he's a serious academic. So for a little girl it was arresting. But I just remember his kindness and his interest in my interest in art, or even the fact that I was there. So my memory is from an early, early date as a child. I didn't start out being in awe of it. I think that's a lot of what we lack here, is that parents, your first source of information and education and so forth, have a lot to do with cultivating that interest in you. And then they had a strong interest in art. They were collectors as well. And at the time Jamaica was small. You knew everybody. They had friends who were artists. One of my father's cousins is an artist. So those kinds of relationships made it a familiar landscape for me.​ I would go to shows away at university. The way they present and advertise and market their shows is so compelling. And museums can be free if you're a student. So access was important and it helped to sustain that kind of interest. But generally speaking, it started at a very young age.”

Tamara Scott Williams | Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic (Founder of artephemera, NGJ Board, Previous 21 years Lifestyle Editor/Columnist Observer)

 

“My mom was an art dealer. And I was born in a shop where they made for a new church. The grandfather was also an art dealer. So, since I was born, I saw art. That's a way of living. But I never understood that until I became an adult myself. Yeah, it was a classic art like antiques and shit like that, but I was always surrounded by things. I didn't understood until I got older, but yeah very early.

I went to many multiple things with art, because it was the only thing that kept me focused. So I was in art class very young, eight, nine. After classes, I didn't like sports. Like in my country, [Venezuela] you were a boy, you gotta play baseball. I hated that. So art would keep me in the same place for hours. So my mom would put me into everything she could. And then I went to art school. I went to the science school and I went to caricature school. And I always thought when I moved to United States, I wanted to work for Disney, and that was my first job. When I came here I worked for Disney as a caricature artist. So yeah, always painting something, always doing it.”

[My first experience with Jamaican art] was reggae. I have two brothers in the house. And they have VHS tapes with videos from Reggae Sumfest. And that’s the reason I am here. And for me it's a lifelong dream. And now I'm painting for it is pretty wild. So I got used to reggae really early, maybe 14, 15. And it was love at first sight and I still today only listen to reggae and cumbia. And I remember looking at the graphics of the videos and Exodus and those graphics were powerful to me. Simple and strong. You didn't have to be an expert to see it.”

Christian (Golden) Saravia | Artist (Venezuelan Artist assisting with the Reggae Sumfest Mural)

 

“Seeing some of my dad's geographic design[s] [was my first memory of art]. So growing up in Jamaica, he would take me to his office where other people and he would be doing graphic design work on Mac computers. So super young growing up around that... I [would create] these photo manipulation stuff on web browser applications, on my dad's computer, when I was in high school. It was just quirky things like low quality pictures that I would take on a phone and then upload that to the computer, upload that to the web browser. Nowadays we have Canva, but there were other ones that existed then. So I was experimenting with that and just having a blast and then I downloaded a software called "Gimp”, that is like a free version of Photoshop, and experimented with that.  I'd say we're referring to the ages of 14, 15.”     

Acquille Dunkley | Artist (Visual artist, 3D animation, creative director)

 

“Right after high school…I was at a crossroads. I initially wanted to become a pilot...my dad had invested in an animation studio back then. It was primarily just 3D animation. My dad liked niches, you know, like cool, interesting areas where he can invest his money. He didn't want the typical type of business and he saw [animation] as something cool and it made sense and he invested in the animation studio, bought equipment. I was around from the beginning and I understood what was going on but my mind wasn't fully there until I had that talk with him and he told me to just stay here for a while and learn the business. We got equipment, we got a teacher that was from Full Sail University. And that's when I learned about building textures for 3D objects. And we also started classes, the whole works as a full-fledged studio...The animation space back then was non-existent. There was no industry. We were just doing everything by ourselves.”                                                     Alwayne White | Artist (Animator, Media Production)

 

“[My first experience with art was] probably going to museums as a child in Bruges. There was some art in the homes of my grandparents, most of it quite conventional which is called Bruges School,  which is primarily views of the city, which was quite popular in the 19th century. So lots of middle-class families have these sort of paintings in their households. And then, of course, art classes in nursery school and so on. But I think between what was in the homes and then going to museums, which my family did quite actively, both when travelling and at home. In Bruges, museum admission for the city museums is free for local residents on Sundays. So it's sort of something that a lot of families commonly do, just go to the main museum, go see the permanent exhibitions and so on. So it was very normalised.” 

Veerle Poupeye | Curator, Collector, Investor, Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic (Director Cayman Islands National Museum, Past Executive Director National Gallery of Jamaica, Past Edna Manley Faculty, Author “Caribbean Art (The World of Art)”)

 

“[My first experience with art was] coming from India, something I saw my mom do, my aunts do, an Indian tradition.   Very early in the morning, before sunrise, all the women in the house get up early and bathe. And the kitchen is one of the most sacred parts of the house because that's where food is. Food is life. That's where fire is. You have to cook, so fire is life. So it's all symbolism. One of the first things they do is to clean up before bathing, clean up the front of the house and wash it, especially in front of the main entrance. They take rice flour and draw patterns. It's called different names in different parts of India. It's called rangoli, R-A-N-G-O-L-I, which means colors. Rang means color in Hindi. So a design of colors is rangoli. And in the south of India it's called kolam, K-O-L-A-M.  It’s made of rice flour. Now why rice flour? By the time it's mid-morning or so, ants will come or other little insects, and birds will come and eat it. So it's not even just design, but it's an ecosystem to honor every living being so that they are also taken care of. So we as humans, however we can, can help others. It starts with that little thing.

​

Saris are [also] a work of art. It’s seven yards, you see your mother wearing it every day. And even the saris themselves, especially South Indian saris, have very intricate designs of peacocks. The peacock is India's national bird. So peacock is very prominent. And there are minarets. In the south of India, the temples have huge entryways, and those are intricately hand woven, into the fabric. [Art] was not something that you would go out to see, like you have to plan a visit to a gallery. But it's right there at home. So you know the art in that sense, the creativity in that sense, has been embedded from a very early part of your life as a child. It's part and parcel of your life. And at the same time, how your creativity is helping others. You know, art for good. That's what also comes out of it.”                                                                                                                                            Amitabh Sharma | Critic, Curator, Collector, Investor (Arts & Education Editor for The Gleaner)

 

“I went to Edna Manley to do a portfolio development class. I lived three hours away from Edna Manley so the whole journey and everything was a part of the excitement. I did this drawing of a model. That was the first time I was drawing a person and he was nude, and I took it back to high school the next day and showed everybody. And they were so excited that you know first of all I'm drawing a nude model, and then secondly that wow you're really good, like this is amazing. So I felt really proud.

​

I grew up in St. Elizabeth, Santa Cruz. My mother is a farmer, and at the time things just perfectly aligned. I was going into sixth form in high school. I realized that I wanted to do art and I wasn't happy with whatever portfolio I would have had on my own. She found out that there was this portfolio class at Edna Manley and she just happened to get a contract to deliver some of her produce to Kingston. And so every week she would be delivering pumpkins and thyme, scallion, that kind of thing. But she used it as an opportunity to pick me up from high school and then carry me to Edna Manley after she dropped off the produce. She took me to Edna Manley every Thursday for I think it was like a whole semester. So it just kind of perfectly aligned that she could do that. I actually had to skip a geography class. So she would pick me up at 1:30 at Hampton and then we would drive, sometimes four hours. I think I was the only person from outside. I think it was in the summer, we went to Kingston and we stopped at the college and tried to get some information. The secretary told us about this program and we're like, well, that's impossible because we're in St. Elizabeth, so that's not going to happen. I think it was by the end of the summer, my mother is like, actually, we can do this because I'm going to have this contract to take stuff into Kingston. So let's do it on the same day that you would have the portfolio class, and we just have to work out something with the high school to allow you to leave school early and miss your geography class.”

[Art education experience in high school:]”I felt like I didn't really get a full understanding of art per se. When I was in high school or being in St. Elizabeth, you'd see an episode of some show where somebody's an artist and it just seems so silly or almost like kind of aloof, kind of mystical. But I didn't really have a solid grounding in any kind of history per se of visual art. But when my mother and I were coming into Kingston for that portfolio thing, every Sunday the Gleaner would have a section that tells you about different activities and events. And so we'd look in the art section for exhibitions, and every Thursday if we had the time after she dropped off her stuff we might stop at a gallery. So I learned about a lot of Jamaican artists in that period. And she learned a lot about art too. So we were kind of both learning about contemporary Jamaican art.”

Camille Chedda | Visual Arts Educator, Artist, Curator (Mixed Media Artist, EMCVPA Lecturer, InPulse Project Manager, Curator)

“My first experience with visual art that I can remember...was going to a Devon House craft fair around Christmas time. I remember my mum taking me there, and I remember just looking at the different stalls and all the different things that were being produced and sold. So that would have included some paintings. I've always been drawing and painting and just doing stuff as a child, playing with art. And I remember one time, one of my parents arranged for me to have a private painting lesson with an artist, Betty White, Elizabeth White. She's a painter and I remember going to her house and she taught me how to mix paints. And then she taught me how to do a grid over a photograph of a woman's face from a magazine. And then she showed me how I would paint a portrait basically, and that was one of the best moments of my entire life because someone sat down with me and taught me. I was eight. It started when I was eight and I moved to England and then I returned. I finished the painting and sent it to her when I was nine. She was really pleased. And I think she was happy that I'd seen it through.”.                                                                               Jessica Knight | Artist, Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic (Artist, Writer)