Jamaica Observer

Dawn Campbell-Douglas, Features editor
Sunday, March 24, 2002
 

Those in art circles have long been in awe of Gene Pearson's creations.

Collectors of his work can be described as a cult following -- coming back for more and rarely ever growing tired of them.

Last year Pearson, 56, was inducted in the Caribbean Development for the Art and Culture Foundation's Hall of Fame for being a proponent of art in the Caribbean and beyond its islands.

In May, he will travel to Belgium for yet another showing where 10 of his pieces will be mounted.

These international outings are nothing new for the Clarendon native, who spends several months of the year abroad, working out of the Potter's Studio Berkeley, California, and exhibiting around the world making stops at galleries in New York, Florida and London's Albert Museum.

The former Jamaica School of Art lecturer paints and sketches, but it is his signature Nubian masks and heads for which he has become a sensation.

The masks, which bear simple names -- The Face, Evening, Morning -- resemble everyone but no particular person. They proudly present strong African facial features and may wear Nubian knots (also known as "Chiney bumps") or plaits.

"Most people wear masks from day to day," he mused with a mischievous chuckle. "The face you see sometimes is not the face that's there."

Known to duck media interviews, Pearson sat down for a chat with SunDay that raced from mid-morning to early afternoon.

"I started out as a potter but now I regard myself as a ceramist," he told SunDay.

"He is one of the very first ceramist and artist to have worked outside of Jamaica and has started to be represented by American galleries," said Gilou Bauer, curator of the Mutual Gallery.

According to Bauer, Pearson along with Cecil Baugh and Norma Rodney-Harrack have put ceramics at a different level, which is at a level of greater acceptance.

"Gene Pearson is a very important because he has started to sculpt ceramics in a very, very different way... there has been an African retention in his work of women and men that has never been seen before," she told SunDay.

The first mask he made was small and was from the head of a broken clay piece. The experiment worked.

"I made a mould from the broken piece and I started to hand press these masks. It was easier to travel with them abroad. People started collecting them. It was easy to find space for them as they went on the wall."

He is an important success symbol for young sculptors, hoping to gain a greater share of small market for visual arts.

There are times when even he is taken aback by the lavish praise and attention his work receives.

"I never thought I could make a living doing art," said Pearson, who starts throwing clay and hand molding pieces at day-break.

Throwing takes place when the potter shapes the clay with his bare hands on the spinning potter's wheel.

The process of liquefying, drying and kneading the clay before drying it again in preparation for the potter's wheel and hot kiln is akin to his own life.

A survivor, who has spent clay 40 working with clay, he said the earthly material "is an art form to create images and still spirits".

The masks and heads are impressive but it has been an arduous climb with art sales succumbing to the varying economic tide and sculpture not receiving the same attention and respect as paintings.

He sees the promotion of clay sculpture as his personal battle.
"I have had to fight to get some recognition for the clay, boycotting the National Gallery for years when they were at Devon House. They only wanted to show paintings and metal works, they didn't recognize the clay," Pearson said noting the irony that while, "clay was at the back in Jamaica it was in the middle or at the top in England."

Potters then he said found it easier to, "throw pots and pans."

A participant in the local representation of an artistic renaissance, which started in the 1950s, he shared a small space with then budding artists -- Barry Watson coming in from England, Eugene Hyde and Karl Paraboosingh from Paris.

It was an exciting time for the development of art in Jamaica, which Pearson is quick to stress, existed long before there was an art school.

"It was an exciting time, the beginning of something having been released from our colonial masters."

Cecil Cooper, Albert Huie, Ralph Campbell were gaining prominence at the time.
People then traveled to Mexico and Haiti to buy art.

A quiet movement, he said, with apprentice geniuses pushing for more recognition of home art under the tutorship of Robert Sawyers, who Pearson describes as, "the Burning Spear in the beginning of the whole thing."

It was esteemed company for the 14 year-old fresh out of Greenwich Primary school.
"I just wanted to be an artist with a difference somehow. I was privileged to start at the time when I did, " he said.

At about this time the young artists came into contact with Edna Manley.

He regards her greatest contribution to Jamaican art as using her advantageous position as wife of the premier and later on mother of the prime minister to get government funding for art development.