The Editor, Sir:

As with music, Jamaicans have a wish that other aspects of our culture, like our art, will find world recognition and respect, worlwide. Yet, apart from a class-conscious sense of pride for the possession of 'art pieces,' the nation has very little sense, on the whole, of its culture as reflected in pieces of its art.

A chic superficiality denies insight into the common currency of meaning being offered for the world in the work of its artists.

Exemplifying such absence of national sensitivity, I would like to draw attention to the work of a most important creative artist and a particular piece of art being strangely sidelined. I speak of Christopher Gonzales and his sculptured depiction of Bob Marley, which, in recent years, has found a new home at Island Village in Ocho Rios, away from the seclusion of the National Gallery.

Gonzales' rendition of a poet-warrior rising, rooted as a tree spreading music for the world, has been seen as controversial for not being of 'realism'. ( African logic is of 'real spirit manifest' not body profiling).

A quote from Rastafari/Reggae's Bob Marley eloquently describes the symbolism in this controversial classic art of Christopher Gonzales: "I 'n I a di root.' The "singing tree" is of African mythology widespread. Philosophy of visual artist, singer, and African tradition merging in musical message for all mankind : Africa as Mother of Mankind urging One Love, One Heart rooted in mankind's archaeological common origin of Ethiopia - as in the sculpture, Ethiopia hath stretched forth its hand 'pleading to mankind'.

If the art establishment of Jamaica truly wants to shed its exclusivist pretensions and attract children and the so-called 'common people' to view art - as of the National Gallery - then let's begin to recognise language in art expressing philosophy of life as is very much possible in the rich body of work coming out of the piercing primitivist truth, symbolic in the likes of Kapo and Brother Everald Brown.

I am, etc.,

Barry Lincoln

Jamaica Deaf Association,

Brown's Town, St Ann,