Detail of “The Wild Beast I never saw in Namibia”

Opening Remarks – 13th June, 2001
Dr. Patricia Mohammed,
Senior Lecturer/Head
Centre for Gender and Development Studies,
University of the West Indies,
Mona, Kingston, Jamaica

Rex was born in London at the outbreak of the second world war. He describes himself as a war baby. His early childhood was spent being evacuated from London and dealing with the shortages and absences that war brings. One of these absences was a father who was stationed in Burma during the first five years of his childhood.

Like many West Indians, Rex was raised by a working mother, a kind woman whom I had the pleasure of knowing for four short years before she died. She brought him up to be a gentleman and a scholar, making sure he had a good grammar school education in post war England, not an easy task for a single working class mother. When he was eighteen, his first job was as a clerk in an insurance office, Provident Mutual Life Assurance Association, where he had to wear a formal suit, keep strict nine to five hours and enter figures into a big Dickensian ledger book each day. He sustained this job for two short years but rejected the formality and strictures of a white collar occupation to begin a peripatetic occupational journey which would take him from dishwashing in restaurants in London when he says he first worked with Caribbean people, (most of them Jamaican in Lyons Corner houses), a waiter in Spain and different parts of London and England, garbage collector, conscientious objector to compulsory military service, and eventually, by the age of twenty seven, as an art student in the west of England in Devon. Among his several subsequent jobs as a trained artist and art educator was that of teaching in Belfast in the heightened tensions of the eighties, when as an Englishman you had to tread very carefully, both literally and otherwise.

He came to Jamaica in 1985, leaving the New University of Ulster in Belfast to teach painting at The Edna Manley School for the Visual and Performing Arts. He has lived continuously in the Caribbean since. In September 2000 he did a retrospective of his fifteen years in Jamaica at the Mutual life Gallery in Kingston. Some of the paintings here were also exhibited in that show, but this one has its own character. It is a selection from many works over fifteen years. One could easily have selected another fourteen from the numerous paintings he has made over this time and create another narrative.

Rex’s life and his paintings demonstrate not only a remarkable capacity to adjust to differences of time and space, but an unwillingness to conform to the rigidities of an institutional framework, and to dictates of one kind or another. Much of this is expressed in the eclectic nature of his work which may not be fully apparent in this selection. If anything pulls these pieces together is that in all of Rex’s work is a celebration of the continuity of painting since the introduction of oil painting in the 16th century. The medium of painting itself has a history - it does not start out as art form in the 21st century, it has an iconography which as a painter you relate to, just like other disciplines of dance and music. The popular label or school to which Rex’s work is said to belong is that of abstract expressionism. This no doubt was one of the influences particularly at the time in which he was in art school and influenced by a movement the European equivalent of which is called Tachism. The main British component was the St. Ives School with people like Brian Wynter, Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton. The defining aspect of this movement is that the painter is looked upon as the conduit through which emotion appeared on the canvas. It is the difference between Impressionism which is an optical illusion of nature, to a painting which is a receptacle of the acts, marks, stroke, drops and dollops of the painter on canvas, it is less observational and more existential. This is not to say that the painter has not contemplated the painting or works in the same way as others in this genre.

One of the things one learns about Rex very soon is that he does not wish to decipher his work for the viewer, he wants you to look at it and see what it means to you. This does not have to be a didactic message. It may be a combination of effects like feeling as well as visual. Painting has its own set of rules, past masters and traditions. The artist is always engaged in a dialogue with this, true creativity emerging most when one challenges or breaks with past tradition, or can reinvent it in new ways. For example the painting Dejeuner, a naked lady between two clothed men, is a pastiche of the late 19th century French painter Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner Sur l’herbe. Rex offers a contemporary interpretation of the same motif. I asked Rex why did he want to do it, he said because its there. (Just like Edmund Hilary said about climbing Mt. Everest). But joking aside, many of his paintings such as Doing the Intuitive Shuffle and Susannah and the Elders, not included in this show, are part of a painting tradition of pastiche and remembrance if you like, of old masters.

Rex invites us to become part of this visual language of seeing – this is a language which has no divide, no east, west or north or south. It is a point relevant to all art forms again, whether painting, sculpture, writing or music. Artists borrow generously from each other constantly, without apology, as they must. While interpretations based on the appeal of colour or form is spontaneously available to everyone, the hidden messages, secrets and skill of the painter may also be decoded if one understood something of these visual grammars. If this language isn’t learnt then we lose something of the richness which the artist offers us - like reading this phrase from a poem by Derek Walcott in The Bounty – He writes "I cannot remember the name of that seacoast city, but it trembled with summer crowds, flags, and the fair with the terraces full and very French, determinedly witty, as perhaps all Europe sat out in the open air that was speckled and sun-stroked like Monet that summer" (The Bounty, Part Two, 1). To have never seen a Monet painting or understood the lightness of the Impressionists’ touch is to lose the essence of Walcott’s imagery in these lines. Similarly, much of Rex’s work speaks to motifs within painting, drawn primarily perhaps from his European training and background – but his work and influences are constantly in motion, always engaging with what is around him. The Caribbean has been incrementally added on to this European sensibility over the last fifteen years, a sensibility which is aided also by his voracious reading of fact and fiction of the Region.

In each creative art form there is the biographical and this perhaps is what I feel most competent to focus on in this exhibition which spans a crucial fifteen years of Rex’s thirty five years as a painter. Some of this I have come to know from talking to him of course, so I draw on passing conversations, and add my own reading at times. He says "My paintings refer to, amongst other things, real and imaginary landscapes, to nostalgia, to certain states of mind and to the persistence of memory". Migration is a theme which is consistently confronted by Rex in his art, the coming to terms of a man with abandonment of birthplace, with the distance from family and the familiar, and finding the continuity for relocating oneself in a new environment. Rex is a prolific painter and has a boundless imagination, displayed in his everyday wit, for those of us who know him personally, sometimes in the Puckish humor of his work, and at times frightening in the darkness of an image. I would like to talk a little about a few of the paintings which are here in this exhibition.

The painting titled The Middle Passage is a literal interpretation of a well thumbed phrase in this part of the world. The middle passage is made up of yellow crosses with black outline against a blue background, classically calm, controlled and pigmented, flanked on either side by gestural areas of silver and matt black paint. The silver is reflective and the matt black which is blackboard paint absorbs the light. He came to this after working on a series of black and white drawings, because he wanted to find a way to absorb reflected light, the black absorbs, and the silver reflects. He says it is very like the contrast between the hot sun on a zinc or galvanize fence and the shaded interiors where the light is absorbed rather than reflected. It is for the artist capturing the difference of light in a space, the sunlight in the tropical Caribbean or golden sunshine as Naipaul quipped, being hot searing light, compared to the diffused European light. Another point came to my mind, viewing this painting in the light of Rex’s comments. It can also be viewed from the historical anthropologist’s perspective as a twenty first century reinvention of the idea of the Middle Passage. A disruption begins and continues on either side, while the centre represents a space in which a strange order was temporarily established.

Celtic Memory tells me a great deal about Rex’s crossing from Europe to the Caribbean, a modern day journey from the old world to the new – the fleshed out spaces on the right representing the charted territory of the old world which he has known and the dark and blank spaces on the left the new one he has entered and is discovering. Doing research in the Seville Archives in Spain last year, I came across the early navigational maps and sketches of the Caribbean before names were sprinkled, or shapes defined, by the old explorers and seafarers. I found in the cartography of the sixteenth century a similar treatment of spaces which they did not know before they arrived. This discovery and mapping has continued in colour, shape and profusion of images, moving Rex back and forth from an internal excitement and desire to control and take command of the medium of paint itself, to the contextual subject matter he is addressing.

Lesson and Inside Out are two paintings which also use the play of black against silver, inviting contrast and reflection, and in the case of Lesson, also building on earlier motifs in painting. It might interest you to know however that the paintings from this series, were used by the University of the West Indies Press at the Mona campus as book covers for their biography series. Lesson illustrates the cover of Bridget Brereton’s Law, Justice and Empire The Colonial Career of John Gowrie, 1829-1892, while Inside Out illustrates the biography of M.G. Smith by Douglas Hall, entitled The Man Divided. Rex’s work has been used for ten published books by the University of the West Indies Press and other international publishers.

The experience of travel can serve as fresh oxygen to artists. In our first trip to Namibia and South Africa in 1998 Rex came across the work of the recently deceased printmaker John Muafangeho – here again the starkness of white on black, along with images, real and imagined of Africa, led to a series of paintings influenced by this visit. One is displayed in this exhibition, "The Wilde Beast I never saw in Namibia". As an aside, it was Rex’s and my first trip to Africa and Rex was longing to see a wildebeest. He never did see one on this visit, but Rex’s double entendre humour is laced liberally with the imagery which was evoked by this visit to the continent.

Message Eric was made after a fellow teacher and painter Jamaican Eric Cadien was killed by gunmen. Utilizing the same silver and black this painting is concerned with our inability to communicate with people while they are alive. Only in retrospect - when they are no longer there, does one take the opportunity to say what you want to say to them. But how do you make an image about this without being literal, and at the same time needing to do this. Gran’s Box: Tribute to Edna Betty Wright is about the same dilemma.

This piece, apart from its artistic contribution, holds a deep poignancy for Rex. In October 1998 Rex’s mother, Gran Edna as she was always called, died suddenly at age 84. She was cremated in London, his closest link to England the land of his birth now gone, and with it another rung in the ladder which takes this migrant away from his homeland. Those possessions of hers which he wanted to keep were shipped to Jamaica in a huge wooden crate, which you see before you painted as Gran’s Box. This is Rex’s tribute to his mother.

Rex’s paintings in general are also another kind of legacy – we are all of us travelers in time, saying goodbye to each other in this way or that, but we each leave something of ourselves to ensuing generations. Artistic production has always represented monetary value to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, increasingly so in a consuming world. After all artists must also eat to work. But there is another level at which art works – it transmits the preoccupations, creative energy and optimistic soul of humanity, rather than the spirit of destruction. I invite you to look around again and again, and to read the messages which this representation of Rex’s art for the last fifteen years sends out to each of you.

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Rex Dixon
‘The Jamaican Paintings’
15th June - 11th August, 2001.

Rex Dixon’s statement:
"The current paintings are . . . an extension of literally dozens of figurative drawings on paper which I produced in 1997 in, The Netherlands for a one person show at the via Galerie, Noordeinde, Den Haag. As for unorthodox surfaces – I like to use surfaces which have a history to them – hence a canvas which I have in the studio with an image on it seven or eight years old, I will paint or draw over it, or a neighbour may discard some old packing case lids, and I use this as a starting point for a painting."

About Rex Dixon:
Rex Dixon was born in London, England in 1939. After teaching in the painting department at the New University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland for several years, he went to Jamaica to teach at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts. He taught there from 1985 until 1997. In 1997, he gave up his teaching position to paint full-time.

Dixon has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in Kingston and abroad, and his paintings are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica and other private collections. Dixon has travelled extensively with his wife, not only in the Caribbean, but also the Netherlands, Namibia and Japan. His experiences form these travels have influenced his paintings and are fed back into his paintings. Rex Dixon is currently living in Trinidad and is in the process of building a studio at his home in Maracas Valley, St. Joseph, where he will continue working and plans to spend time between
Trinidad and Jamaica.

'The Jamaican Paintings' were part of CCA's continuous programme of exhibitions in the InterAmericas Space at CCA7 from June 13th to August 11th 2001.

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