Banana Plantation

John Dunkley, Banana Plantation, c. 1945

A recent New York Review of Books introduced me to the art of John Dunkley (1891 - 1947), a self-taught Jamaican painter whose landscapes remind me of Samuel Palmer's.  He was apparently familiar with Blake, Henri Rousseau, Surrealism and even Chinese painting, which was championed by the art historian in charge of the Institute of Jamaica, where Dunkley spent much of his time when he wasn't working as a barber.  In the NYRB article, Sanford Schwartz notes the aptness of the recent exhibition's title, 'John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night': darkness seems to be ever-present in these paintings.  Here is how Schwartz describes Dunkley's landscapes.  

'They take us less to Jamaica (or to the island of popular imagination) than into the mind of someone who happened to be Jamaican. Dunkley’s pictures, which generally are not of particular places in his country, are in many instances like crosses between little theater sets and the creations of a landscape architect. The painter’s characters, so to speak, are meaty plants, assertive leaves, and cumbrous rosettes (or clusters of leaves), which he makes resemble heads of enormous cauliflowers. There are tidy stone walls, brand-new-looking log fences, and strange cut-down trees, which stick out here and there like baseball bats and can strike viewers, we read in the catalog, as “unabashedly phallic.”

[... His backgrounds] are marked by roads or canals—or allées, river beds, shoreline bluffs, or walkways—that swerve, or zoom off in straight lines, into complete darkness. Next to the stilled and emphatic vegetable life at center stage, these many routes to or from somewhere provide a welcome cursive elegance and sense of movement. We are not sure if they represent invitations to depart from our garden world or stand for uncertainties that our garden world keeps us from facing.'

As this exhibition won't be crossing the Atlantic, I can't see Dunkley's intriguing-sounding paintings for myself.  However, here is another description of them, from a review in the New York Times by Roberta Smith (the eminent art critic, nothing to do with the British artist Bob and Roberta Smith):

'Working in a faded-tapestry palette of mostly black, dark brown and white tinted with green, rose and yellow, he energized his images with disorienting shifts in scale, perspective and form. Bushes and trees suggest large vegetables or flowers; chopped-off tree trunks intimate water pipes, corncobs or phalluses. The branches they sprout are often trees unto themselves. Numerous paths and lanes disappear into dark forests or tunnels while reinforcing the flatness of the canvas. The paint textures range from a thick stucco (used mostly for sheep) to a thinned-down Impressionism (thatches of strokes that denote either grassy banks or overflowing water). Sexual tensions abound, along with a mood that has been called melancholy or gloomy.'

 John Dunkley, Back to Nature, 1939