Soooo let me hit you guys with some background. Who are we as artists without some mentorship? Probably just a bunch of blind recluses doing whatever we want without giving a damn what people think of it. That sounds great and all but that doesn't fly in art school. So I contacted my student mentor at CNU, Ashley Remington yesterday absolutely freaking out about my Senior Seminar project. And she helped me out by helping me with research (because I'm challenged at finding artists). So I took a deep breath, gathered my thoughts, and took the day off of work to get some serious work done. Because let's be serious, when you work 70-80 hours a week, finding time to eat and sleep is the first thing on your mind, not making art (just being real here). In a perfect world, I wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck and I would have all of this done by now. Instead, I've accepted the fact that instead of the usual 6 hours of sleep a night, I'm going to cut down to 2-3 in order to get this all done. My life is such a joke.
Meet Llewellyn Xavier, a Caribbean artist from St. Lucia who has some serious talent when it comes to working with color. I love his work, and if it were at all possible for me to afford his work, I'd hang it up on the biggest wall of my apartment. But I'm broke, so the best I can do is honor him with my first in-depth blog entry on how inspired he makes me feel not only in what he makes, but in how devoted he is to his heritage. You can visit his website here. So HERE WE GO!
Llewellyn Xavier
Llewellyn Xavier is considered one of the Caribbean’s modern geniuses with a paintbrush. As an artist from St. Lucia, a small mountainous island in the Caribbean, his subject matter reflects his roots to the land where he was born. For example, pieces from his Emerald Piton series portray the soft hazy mountain peeks that make up the majority of the terrain on St. Lucia. From 1961 to 1987 Xavier travelled to Barbados and England during which time he made a name for himself in art and developed as a Caribbean artist. He took in influences from his time in England, and transitioned from working primarily in watercolor, to working in collage. His collages, comprised mostly of recycled materials, stood as conservation pieces, and earned him his current reputation as a conservation artist contributing to the Commonwealth. His contribution has been so great, in fact, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution have featured him.
Not only does Llewellyn Xavier’s work as a whole speak to me, but his story as an artist about leaving his home and discovering art inspires me as well. Xavier found his talent elsewhere, but everything he did in art related back to his roots as a Caribbean artist, to the point where he became an advocate of conservation with his home’s interests in mind. Xavier’s work as always stayed tied back to where he came from and he never strayed from his identity as a Caribbean artist. As someone who is trying to reconnect with her roots, I appreciate his strong connection to where he came from, and his care for where his home will be going.
Aside from concept, I’m really into Xavier’s use of color. His early work uses a limited but saturated palette with bold figures, such as Untitled (The Emerald Piton Series), while his later work uses a variety of saturated color in organic shapes, as exemplified in his Environment Fragile series. I’m a fan of his range in color use. I think it shows that he works very successfully with a simple palette as well as a busy one. I think his use of color immediately identifies him as a Caribbean artist. He creates a tropical atmosphere with his use of color, painting deeply textured skies and hazed out mountains.
When I was 17 I visited St. Lucia with my family, only days before Hurricane Dean hit and desolated the island. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the majestic mountains was that this island was the Hawaii of the Caribbean. It was my first experience in a jungle, and I saw texture and volume in nature that I had never seen before. Xavier conveys both the simple enormity of the mountains, and the volume of texture in his artwork. The moment I saw his work, I knew what Caribbean island it was speaking of. I want to strive for that strong identity in my work. Visiting the Caribbean has allowed me to see Caribbean art as a reflection of the unique terrain and foliage that only the Caribbean possesses. In poor countries and islands, such as St. Lucia, the people are very much so dependent on the land that they live on with a relationship of give and take from not only the land but the stormy hot climate. Caribbean artists, no matter where they are from, identify themselves as Caribbean artists within their inspiration of the powerful land that both gives and takes life.
Xavier, Llewellyn. Artist Llewellyn Xavier. 2007. Web. 2 August 2011. <http://www.llewellynxavier.com/artist.html>.
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