INTUITIVE artist Brother Everald Brown is dead. He died on Monday June 3, in the United States at the home of his daughter, according to information reaching The Sunday Gleaner. Brother Brown had been ailing for years and, in early 2000, suffered a stroke from which he recovered. Following the death of his wife, Sister Jennie in April, Brother Brown travelled to Brooklyn, New York to visit his daughter Myrtle and her family. And it was at her home he died.
Brother Brown leaves sons Clinton, Joseph, Errol, and Winston and daughters Dorothy, Myrtle, Sandra, Venice, Ruth and Rebecca. The children are following in their father's footsteps as artists and, in February, an exhibition, titled "Brother Everald Brown and Family", showcased paintings, sculpture, and musical instruments by the late artist and four of his children, Rebecca, Ruth, Sandra, and Joseph, at the Mutual Gallery.
Paying tribute to the late artist, the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) has hailed him as "one of Jamaica's greatest artists, an intuitive master".
The gallery is preparing to mount a full-scale retrospective of Everald Brown in July 2003, and had recently named Veerle Poupeye Rammelaere, the foremost authority on Brother Brown's work, as guest curator for the exhibition.
Mrs. Rammelaere, who is currently in the island conducting research on Everald Brown's oeuvre, has written the following tribute to Brother Brown:
"Brother Everald Brown is one of the defining figures in twentieth-century Jamaican art. His artistic beginnings can be situated in the popular cultural ferment in West Kingston that produced Rastafarianism and reggae, fuelled by rural-to-urban migration and growing race and social consciousness among the popular masses.
"Brother Brown was primarily interested in the spiritual aspects of Rastafarianism and established The Assembly of the Living, a self-styled mission of the Ethiopian Orthodox church, which was located along Spanish Town Road. His earliest preserved works are carved ritual objects, such as his prayer staff, and the painted decorations he produced for his church.
"These early works illustrate Brother Brown's assimilation of Ethiopian Orthodox artistic models but also his rootedness in older Afro-Jamaican popular culture, particularly Zion Revivalism and Pocomania. Most of all, they reflect the remarkable spiritual and visual imagination that made Everald Brown one of the most original artists of his generation.
"During the 1960s, The Assembly of the Living became an attraction and local and overseas patrons came to see the church and the religious rituals and musical performances carried out by Brother Brown and his family.
"Encouraged by his patrons and the changing cultural climate of post-Independence Jamaica, which became more receptive to popular culture, he began to produce paintings and sculptures that were included in local and overseas exhibitions and acquired by his early supporters. His rapidly developing technical and imaginative skills led to such works as Ethiopian Apple (1970), in which he characteristically used visual and verbal punning, based on mystical association, to symbolise the centrality of Ethiopia to his thought and humanity's sacred oneness with nature.
"Disenchanted with the increasingly tense socio-political climate in West Kingston, Brother Brown in the early 1970s moved his family to Murray Mount, in the mountains of St. Ann, not far from his place of birth in upper Clarendon. Inspired by the grandiose vistas and suggestive details of the limestone landscape of central Jamaica, his mystical imagination took full flight and became even less conventional in its use of Rastafarian imagery.
"Based on dreams, meditations and visionary experiences he shared with his family, especially his wife Sister Jenny and son Clinton, he produced paintings such as "Bush Have Ears" (1976), which reflect a vision of nature in which everything is imbued with life and spiritual meaning, to be unearthed by the artist-mystic.
"His mystical communion with nature and imaginative transformations of conventional popular cultural forms, are also evident his woodcarvings, such as 'Lion Rider' (c. 1970), and his symbolically shaped and decorated musical instruments drums, 'Star Banjos' and 'Dove Harps' (guitars) which culminated in the spectacular hybrid 'Instrument for Four People' (1986).
"Now that Brother Brown has passed on, his legacy survives in the work of his children, several of whom continue to work in the iconographic and formal tradition established by their father. Most of all, Brother Brown's legacy survives in the substantial body of work he has left behind, as his contribution to modern Jamaica's cultural heritage and a powerful testimony of the role of the individual imagination in the popular culture." (V.P.R.)
Everald Brown was a strong supporter of the National Gallery's Annual National Exhibitions having participated in 23 of its 25 editions between 1977 and 2001.
He was also a major contributor to exhibitions such as the Intuitive Eye (1979) and Fifteen Intuitives (1987). He also exhibited widely at other venues in the island, including the Olympia Art Centre, Harmony Hall, Mutual Life Gallery and the University of the West Indies. In 1978, he was the recipient of a National Gallery Fellowship, and, in 1999, had a major showing of his work in Britain. The occasion was the exhibition The Elders which he shared with Guyanese artist, Stanley Greaves.
Several of Brother Brown's works reside in the permanent collection of the National Gallery and in public collections in the United States. He is also represented in numerous private collections around the world.
In 1974 he was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.
Funeral service will be held on Sunday, June 16 at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 89 Maxfield Avunue, Kingston 13, starting at 11:00 a.m. Interment in the family plot at Murray Mount in St. Ann.
