'Fairyscape' by Colin Garland.

Colin Garland, highly acclaimed artist widely regarded as the supreme master of 'Fantasy' and 'Magic Realism' in Jamaican and Caribbean art, died last week at the University Hospital of the West Indies.

Garland who was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1935, studied painting first at the National School of Art, Sydney (1953-5) and later at the Central School of Art and Design, London (1959) before emigrating to Jamaica in 1962. He arrived in the island a competent painter, with the rudiments of his style in place. Inspired essentially by twentieth century Surrealism and Magic Realism, he also studied the work of various artists of previous centuries who have exhibited a taste for the fantastic, such as Botticelli, Bosch, Guiseppe Arcimboldo and Richard Dadd. He also benefited from his knowledge of the art of the Jamaican Intuitive master, John Dunkley, and some of the Haitian 'primitives'.

In the Caribbean, Jamaica and Haiti were his principal sources of inspiration. The land and sea, the flora, the birds, fish and the people of varied types and exotic costumes all feature in his surreal juxtapositions. He was also a sensitive portraitist, illustrator and stage designer his excursions into theseareas were rare.

A Retrospective

In tribute to the artist, the National Gallery of Jamaica submits this excerpt from a speech delivered by chief curator Dr. David Boxer at the artist's 'Retrospective' exhibition, held at the Midori Gallery in Miami in 2002.

"Colin, if I remember my history correctly, it was within days of the celebration of Jamaica's Independence in 1962 that you arrived on our shores, which makes it 40 years. We celebrate the fortieth anniversary of our independence this year and so we celebrate the same anniversary with you. As we celebrate, we recall your years of service in Jamaica as teacher, as designer and as an actively exhibiting artist who has charmed, dazzled, and yes, perplexed us for four decades. You were one of a very small group of painters who in the early years of our independence taught us about the independence of the artistic imagination. You and artists like Eugene Hyde and Osmond Watson demonstrated that there were paths to follow other than those of the nationalist/realist style that virtually defined Jamaican painting in the '40s and '50s.

"Yours has been a lifetime of experience in Jamaica, of being observer and participant in that place. That extraordinary place with its violently clashing juxtapositions and its range of sensibilities from the crudest savageries to the most exquisitely poised refinements, has fueled the most gifted of imaginations and bred an art that took the tenets of symbolism and surrealism grafted them to a basic classicism and spun this fecund mix into a kaleidoscope of fantastic possibilities.

"An endless fascination with life and all organic form and delight in the unusual and the unorthodox have been the driving forces of your art and Jamaica gave you a panorama of endless possibilities. In Jamaica you could witness the hybridisation of the human species as perhaps nowhere else in the world. In Jamaica you could witness too a botany of extraordinary variety, and the endless variety of plants you found as intoxicating as didSir Hans Sloane who spent years cataloguing it all. I remember now my first visit to your house and studio. I was an awestruck student still studying the history of art, and I must confess that my memory of that meeting is almost confined to the memory of your aviary with your exotic imported birds and their wonderfully coloured plumages.

"But what marvels has Garland's imagination wrought over these 40 years: I think of the masterpieces in the National Gallery in Kingston: the 'Fairyscape' and 'In the Beautiful Caribbean', and I think of the wonderful mural of overscaled shells, and the exquisite Eventide that haunting portrait of two young Jamaican women in the crepuscular Jamaica light. It seems of another time, but it is very much of the place. This last, was one of the two paintings which I placed in the Queens bedroom on her recent Jubilee visit to Jamaica. I wanted Her Majesty to experience something essentially Jamaican, something essentially mysterious, something essentially beautiful and it was the first painting that I thought of.

"I include among your masterpieces too, the set and costume designs for the National Dance Theatre's Court of Jah, which I dare say is the finest in the company's history. Rastafarian imagery and colour subjected to the sensibilities of a masterful designer and craftsman ...