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Parboosingh, Karl
(b St Mary, 1923; d Kingston, 1975). Jamaican painter. He studied painting at the Art Students League, New York, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico. He returned to Jamaica in 1953, where he quickly established himself as a major avant-garde figure, challenging the sedate homespun realism of Jamaican artists such as Albert Huie and David Pottinger with vivid Expressionistic canvases. He was influenced by many types of Expressionism, from Rouault’s cloisonnisme, the German Expressionism of Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, through the Mexican muralists (he claimed to have studied with David Alfaro Siqueiros), to Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. His finest works, such as Jamaican Gothic (c. 1968; Kingston, N.G.), reveal him applying his modernist approaches to traditional Jamaican subject-matter. In the late 1960s he produced a monumental series of paintings, based on the life of Christ, which met with some success. The best known of these is Sermon on the Mount (c. 1969; Kingston, N.G.). A few years before his death he became attracted to Rastafarian culture, and inspired in part by photographs of Rastafarians at worship and sacramentally using ganja (marijuana), he embarked on what is generally considered his finest series: sympathetic, richly coloured ‘portraits’ of Rastafarians in ceremonial dress and smoking ganja, as in Ras Smoke I (1974; Kingston, N.G.).
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