Memoirs: Leonard Daley
Artistic fame is volatile. The public awareness of an artist’s work depends greatly on how often it is exhibited, researched, written about, reproduced, and collected, and if that does not happen regularly, artists all too easily disappear from the record, especially after they have passed away. In today’s world, a strong online presence is, furthermore, indispensable. For the next few weeks, I will present short features on Jamaican artists with whom I have worked in the past, and who are at risk of being forgotten, such as Eric Cadien, Milton Harley, Milton George, Gloria Escoffery, Ras Dizzy, Everald Brown, and Leonard Daley. Leonard Daley is the subject of today’s column.
I do not recall exactly when I first met Leonard Daley (c1930-2006) but it was probably during the 1987 Fifteen Intuitives exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica, where I served as assistant curator at that time. Brother D, as he was commonly called, was one of the self-taught, popular artists featured in the exhibition. His raw, hallucinatory work, which included large tarpaulins painted on both sides that were hung to dramatic effect from the ceiling in the central gallery, departed most from the conventional expectations about art in Jamaica. While he was one of the breakthrough artists in that exhibition, his work was also the source of critical contention, as some refused to recognize it as “art”.
By the early 1990s, I was a regular visitor to Brother D’s home in Fidler Hill, in the hills of St Catherine, where he lived until health issues later in life forced him to move to Kingston. The house – an ever-changing wood and zinc shack structure, of which most walls were covered with Daley’s paintings – was surrounded by a large lot of land that was planted rather erratically with various food trees and other crops. The house had an overhanging zinc roof and an intricate system of metal and bamboo gutters to catch rainwater, and the interior was dark, cavernous, and mysterious, echoing the hallucinatory imagery of Daley’s paintings.
Unlike some of the other “Intuitives”, who could be volatile and demanding of monetary and other support, interactions with Leonard Daley were always pleasant but the encounters were always on his terms. Visitors were treated to stories, riddles and a tour of the house and garden, and there was no such thing as a quick visit. He refused to be “owned” by his patrons and saw himself outside of, and even in defiance of, the dominant, conventional hierarchies and value systems of the society in which he lived. This irreverence is evident throughout his work and to understand it, it also has to be understood that he was, at heart, a storyteller.
Daley’s paintings are populated by fluid, abstracted shapes, menacing animals and ghostly humanoid figures, as well as, sometimes, text. Many include john crows, Jamaica’s omnipresent and rather ominous turkey vultures, which are commonly associated with evil, death and hypocrisy in the popular lore. Daley derived provocative pleasure from revealing that he was, in fact, the john crow in his paintings, and he explained that the bird played a useful and indeed necessary role in the natural ecology, despite its negative image. The moral universe depicted in Daley’s human-animal fables is not a clear battle between good and evil as we see in the work of Hieronymus Bosch, with whom he is often compared, but one in which the very notion of such binaries is challenged, as it was in the complex and challenging real world Daley himself inhabited. His work is best understood as a form of “visual reasoning,” or, better even, as “visual riddles” that reflect on that contrary moral universe and his own place in it.
Daley’s provocative, individualist persona and way of thinking may seem perplexing at first but this does not, however, separate him from the popular culture. His reliance on dialectic “reasoning” as an intellectual strategy, for instance, is related to the culture of Rastafari, while his irreverence to power and his refusal of simplistic “good and evil” binaries align him with the trickster figure of Anancy. If anything, it was Daley’s fierce individualism and disregard for the conventional rules that made him so deeply Jamaican.
Leonard Daley’s work does not have the widespread appeal of that of artists whose work is more aesthetically and culturally accessible, such as John Dunkley, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds or Everald Brown; nor has it received the same level of national or international recognition. Daley’s work is perhaps not for everybody, but it is equally significant, artistically and culturally, and it is, arguably, more unique, as it is harder to pinpoint the artistic sources or cultural influences that may have shaped Daley’s vision. He certainly deserves to be actively remembered and recognized as a major and highly original Jamaican artist.
Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant.
