JAMAICA’S LEONARD DALEY: PAINTER OF SWIRLING COSMIC VISIONS

ENTERING — AND REMEMBERING — LEONARD DALEY’S COSMIC-SPIRITUAL WORLD

The interior of the artist Leonard Daley’s one-room house in the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, in 2006. The simple dwelling was filled with the artist’s paintings, plus he had painted many sections of its exterior and interior walls, thereby surrounding himself with the colors and swirling forms of his visionary art. Photograph ©2022 Edward M. Gómez and Ballena Studio, Inc.; all rights reserved. Used by permission.

text and photographs by Edward M. Gómez

Leonard Daley (born circa 1930 in the parish of St. Catherine, Jamaica; died in 2006) was a painter who became known as one of the “Jamaican Intuitives,” a group of self-taught artists whose depictions of nature, people, and events in their local communities, as well as their conceptions of the cosmos, were often informed by both indigenous and ancestral African folklore and by animistic and spiritual beliefs. Collectively, their artistic creations contributed significantly in the decades following their island homeland’s independence from Britain, in 1962, to the shaping of a visible sense of Jamaican national cultural identity.

The artist Leonard Daley (born circa 1930; died in 2006) with some of his paintings in the garden of his house in the hilly outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, in 2006. This photograph was shot several months before he died. Photograph ©2022 Edward M. Gómez and Ballena Studio, Inc.; all rights reserved. Used by permission.

Daley and a group of his generational, autodidact peers became known as the “Jamaican Intuitives” after The Intuitive Eye, the title of an exhibition of their works that was organized by the late David Boxer and presented at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1979. Boxer, who died in 2017, was a Wunderkind art historian and working artist himself who had studied art history in the United States.