Rudi Patterson: Abstract Reflections

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.

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