JAMAICAN INTUITIVES: IT’S RAS DIZZY’S WORLD

A VETERAN COLLECTOR WHO KNEW THE LATE ARTIST REFLECTS ON HIS VISION AND ECCENTRICITIES

by Edward M. Gómez, featuring the recollections of Wayne Cox

Who was the Jamaican artist who was known as “Ras Dizzy”?

Born in or around the year 1932, he first came to the public’s attention in the 1960s as a Rastafarian poet/philosopher who regularly visited the campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, on the south coast of the small, Caribbean island nation. At the school, he sold his ballpoint-pen drawings on paper and mimeographed copies of his poems. By that time, he had begun making paintings, too.

Ras Dizzy, “4 out of 10,” 1993, mixed media on mat board, 13.56 x 19.25 inches (34.44 x 48.89 centimeters). Photo courtesy of Wayne Cox

Dizzy’s writings were featured in Abeng, a weekly publication produced by members of the young radical intelligentsia associated with UWI. The late David Boxer, who for many years served as the director and chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, his country’s national art museum, included Ras Dizzy’s paintings in “The Intuitive Eye,” a seminal exhibition that was presented in 1979. That survey of works by numerous self-taught artists whom Boxer dubbed “the Jamaican Intuitives” brought them and their achievements into the fold of modern Jamaica’s art history.