Ras Dizzy

Jamaican, 20th century.
Born 1932, Kingston, Jamaica; died 2008, Kingston, Jamaica.

“Ras Dizzy” was an itinerant poet and picture-maker who created one of the most stylistically distinct bodies of work of all of the legendary Jamaican Intuitives, a group of self-taught artists whose achievements began to attract serious media and scholarly attention in Jamaica in the late 1970s.

Although many details of Ras Dizzy’s biography remain the stuff of speculation, according to his passport, it is believed that he was born in 1932 as Albert Livingstone. However, he was well known for spinning tall tales about his background and exploits, and sometimes claimed his real first name was “Birth.” He also used the names Birch Lincoln or Dizzy Gillespie Johnson. As an adult, his fantastic-sounding stories earned him the nickname “Dizzy.” “Ras” was a Rastafarian honorific. (Ras Dizzy was associated with the Rastafarian movement, a spiritual way of life derived from African and Old Testament Christian sources; many of its adherents routinely use cannabis.)

Ras Dizzy, who claimed he had traveled to Africa and China, ridden alongside Hollywood cowboys and fought in the boxing ring against Cassius Clay, said he had been partly schooled in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. In the late 1960s, he emerged on the fringes of the art scene there, selling ballpoint-pen drawings and handing out mimeographed sheets of his poetry. At the University of the West Indies, radical intellectuals published his poetic-fantastic, socio-political commentaries in their weekly newspaper. As Ras Dizzy traveled around Jamaica, he sold his drawings or exchanged them for food and lodgings. Some of the people with whom he routinely stayed became his friends and patrons.

The Jamaican Intuitives created pictures and sculptures depicting scenes from the island’s rural and urban life. Some evoked Biblical or African spiritual references. In 1979, the National Gallery of Jamaica, in Kingston, included Ras Dizzy’s work in “The Intuitive Eye,” an exhibition focusing on the work, ideas and life stories of the Jamaican Intuitives. It was organized by David Boxer, who is now a former director and chief curator of the NGA. Eschewing the terms “primitive” or “naïf,” Boxer used the “Intuitives” label to identify his country’s art-making autodidacts. Through this exhibition and two later, similarly themed NGA shows, Boxer’s scholarly efforts helped establish these artists as important contributors to the shaping of modern, independent Jamaica’s sense of national cultural identify. (A former British colony, Jamaica became an independent state in 1962.)

Ras Dizzy’s signature style employed bold colors and simple forms; rendered in poster paint on illustration board, some of his main subjects included cowboys, prizefighters, horseracing tracks, boats, palm trees and food-market vendors. Normally he wrote titles or descriptive captions on the back sides of his pictures and dated his works.

A biographical entry about Ras Dizzy on the National Gallery of Jamaica’s website notes that the artist “chose to live outside of the system, as one who had no fixed address and, for that matter, no fixed name. His nomadic wanderings extended outside of Jamaica [...] to Haiti and Panama.” The bio item adds that Ras Dizzy “lived life on his own terms, as a free spirit. [...] Many of his works are self-images, in [which he appears in] the guise of a Wild West sheriff, an outlaw cowboy, a champion boxer or a racetrack jockey. These images are in part delusional but they are also rooted in the local popular culture and reflect a legitimate yearning for personal status and dignity.”

The National Gallery of Jamaica included Ras Dizzy’s paintings in “Fifteen Intuitives” (1987) and “Intuitives III” (2005), major exhibitions that followed 1979’s “The Intuitive Eye.” His works were regularly shown in the “Intuitives” exhibitions at Harmony Hall, one of Jamaica’s leading galleries, which is located in Ocho Ríos. Overseas exhibitions in which Ras Dizzy’s work appeared have included “Jamaican Intuitives” (1987) at the Commonwealth Institute, London; “New World Imagery” (1995), a survey that toured England; and “Redemption Songs” (1997, 2002), a collection of works by the Jamaican Intuitives, which toured the United States.

David Boxer once called Ras Dizzy “a man who seemingly lives and paints at the very edge of what we might call sane [or] rational existence.” He described the vagabond painter-poet’s oeuvre as that of “a natural expressionist.”

- Edward M. Gómez

Biography

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