Leonard Daley’s Mountaintop at Cavin-Morris Gallery

Leonard Daley (1992) “Yellow Face”, detail; mixed-media on canvas, 21.5 x 15.5 inches.

By JOHN DRURY June 10, 2024

There exists in the nooks and crannies, of the psyche of all peoples, the concern for entities and powers unseen…that which is unknown, often misinterpreted, and yet diligently pursued. We search for meaning in the misunderstood, assigning meaning to the amorphous, the shapes and shadows hitherto free of a pronounced reality as describable by science, and/or plain sight. What is unseen, is generally feared - the mind allowed to conjure, wily and at will, in search of an accurate description, the unknowable. Here, there is everything. And everything is of concern.

Leonard Daley (1993) “Murray Mountain”; oil on canvas, 31 x 52.5 inches.

It is however, in those recesses of the mind - those dark spots - that artist Leonard Daley (1930-2006) found personal solace in a perceived apprehension that which is eternally present, if in fact shy the understanding, a physical plane. There is no absence; there is only ying, to your dangling yang. There is in the pursuit a clarification the light, a necessary dark. Time is compressed. And Daley’s is not the weightless and airy atmosphere of so many the visionary, but is instead heavy, and of the earth…visually hard, tertiary and solid. Here, all that has been, is and may yet be, is recorded in a dense mélange near frivolous and frightful. And in that froth of humanity, akin the medicinal anting of crows, what doesn’t kill you does in fact make you stronger. An experience at once ancient and contemporary, certain truths are revealed in knowing generational oral wealth and learned observation; Daley’s, “If I don’t pass through the river, and I tell you how deep it is, I’m a liar”, allowing insight the honesty with which he approaches a believed truth. At the surface of skin, is air; beneath then, being.

Leonard Daley (1993) “Living in Green”; mixed-media on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.

Emerging on the International scene in 1985, as part of longtime director and chief curator David Boxer’s The Annual National Exhibition, at the National Gallery of Jamaica and a member of his generational group of self-taught artists known as the “Jamaican Intuitives” (including also, the equally influential Ras Dizzy), this is the long overdue, first solo exhibition of Leonard Daley’s works in the US. Daley’s colors lean to cool, the blues of sea and sky united, to compress our sentient essence, at a subsequently pronounced middle ground inhabited by the nature and people of his community; that, where the neither-nor is in search an understanding, the glorious given. We find ourselves “lifted” to the place of wonder, via Daley’s works. Indigenous and ancestral African folklore, color Daley’s sacred and animistic beliefs that plants, objects and natural phenomena, such as the weather, have a living soul. In Daley’s artwork, we are gifted the portal where we might search for the answers to the timeless permanent. It is ours to enter. WM