Kenwyn Crichlow, 'The Inner Drama of Redness,' 2022
I share the concern of many artists – to transmute paint a base material, into the gold of an universal consciousness – and to relieve painting of parochialism and other cultural deadwood that limit artistic power and significance.
Kenwyn Crichlow (Trinidad & Tobago, b. 1951) is a Trinidad-based painter whose unique abstract language is a humanistic, aesthetic, and political choice. For the past forty years, his studio practice has consciously elided figures and symbols, deliberately circumventing the colonial tropes conventionally associated with the Caribbean. An influential arts leader in the West Indies, he reframes Trinidad & Tobago’s art history as a wide arc that rejects the colonial period as its pivot point. In his writing, leadership, and artwork, he brilliantly insists on multiple ways of seeing the landscape in which he and generations of his family were raised.