Rudi Patterson: Abstract Reflections

Travel through Rudi Patterson's abstract reflections as he intellectually sojourned from the Caribbean to Britain. This collection of abstract paintings draw on Patterson's Jamaican heritage, and influences from European artists and styles.

Hearing Voices by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Intuitive and abstract

Rudi Patterson was born in rural Duckenfield, near the Bath Botanical Gardens, in the western parish of St Thomas, Jamaica, and educated in the capital Kingston. Village life, the titanic blue mountains, lush flora and vegetation, vivid colours, magnificent trees and rivers would many years later form the key inspiration of his paintings. He gradually found his own unique and consistent painting style, which was an idealised and romanticised dream of the Jamaican countryside of his childhood, created in distinctly non-tropical London. He painted in gouache, watercolour, acrylic and oil. He had no formal art training in Jamaica or the UK, but found his style through his highly personal diasporic experience. Wesley Kerr described his work as: "immediate in appeal." Patterson has been labelled an ‘intuitive’, but this is a bit simplistic – his imagination was honed by four decades of application and experiment. His work is rooted in the reality and memory of Jamaica, but also enthused by those happy  and productive six decades in England, and influenced by painters as varied as Rousseau and Bridget Riley. He was stylistically far removed from the Jamaican 'intuitive' painters, such as Kapo, and he experimented with other, abstract styles.

Masks by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Village life, the titanic blue mountains, lush flora and vegetation, vivid colours, magnificent trees and rivers would many years later form the key inspiration of his paintings.

Sails by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

He gradually found his own unique and consistent painting style, which was an idealised and romanticised dream of the Jamaican countryside of his childhood, created in distinctly non-tropical London.

Rhythms by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

He painted in gouache, watercolour, acrylic and oil. He had no formal art training in Jamaica or the UK, but found his style through his highly personal diasporic experience.

Abstract Lines by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Wesley Kerr described his work as: "immediate in appeal." Patterson has been labelled an ‘intuitive’, but this is a bit simplistic – his imagination was honed by four decades of application and experiment.

Line Shades A by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

His work is rooted in the reality and memory of Jamaica, but also enthused by those happy and productive six decades in England, and influenced by painters as varied as Rousseau and Bridget Riley.

Lines Shades C by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

He was stylistically far removed from the Jamaican 'intuitive' painters, such as Kapo, and he experimented with other, abstract styles.

Patterned Lines by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Untitled Impasto by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Flower Heads by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

Abstract Bear by Rudi PattersonBlack Cultural Archives

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Explore the legacy of Black artists like Rudi Patterson at BCA in Brixton, London.

Credits: Story

The copyright of this collection is with the Rudi Patterson estate and presented in partnership with Black Cultural Archives.

Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
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