This article is dedicated to my journey as an artist. I left Barbados at the age of 16 to act as an ambassador of sorts at the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (UWC-USA) in the foothills of Montezuma, New Mexico. There I met amazing students from all over the world . The visual arts education was a period of exploration. I dabbled in metalsmithing, jewelry making, stop frame animation, stage design and construction, and painting.
From there I went to Richmond Indiana studying a liberal arts degree at Earlham College for four years. I finished with a joint major in painting and art history and double minor in Spanish and psychology. Again exploration was everything. An arts excursion in the outback of Australia let me learn about indigenous arts firsthand while a semester abroad to Valencia Spain was an immersion in the traditions and of the Fallas festivities.
The next part of my adventure took me to Newcastle upon Tyne for the Master of Fine Art. Even during this chapter I traveled and was thrilled to have completed a visit to Venice for the 54th Biennale. Post-graduate studies challenged me to use visual arts to express complicated subject matter like national identity and cultural studies. I finished in 2011 with a compilation of collages and a screen printed installation entitled “Contrapuntal”, an 8 sided screen-printed and hand-painted gouache on boards coated with true gesso.
Summarizing the impact of these adventures is not easy as each place and experience has shaped who I am today, and to some degree inform the choices being made while painting or writing.
I’ll end with a quote from Emily Dickinson – Dwell in possibility.
