His art has unashamedly imitated Caribbean life

Donald Jackie Hinkson

Chancellor, Jackie Hinkson has been compared with the illustrious Jean Michel Cazabon, one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most celebrated watercolour artists. Cazabon went to Paris to become a doctor but returned a painter. Jackie Hinkson went to Paris to become a painter and returned a patriot!

To be compared with Cazabon is credit enough; but someone observing him at work is reputed to have asked, “Are you Cazabon?” The comparison, though inevitable, is incomplete. For Jackie’s restless creativity has extended him into new and diverse media away from watercolour, his primary medium, to more challenging ones. His rich oils, symbolic acrylics, reductionist charcoals, mighty murals or adventurous sculptures speak of a unique versatility. If the medium IS the message and if his range of media is so broad, is Jackie then guilty of sending mixed messages? There should never be any doubt! Jackie’s medium and his message have always been this space, this our place and all that’s in it: The Caribbean!

His art is not necessarily about beauty nor is it about colour. His art has unashamedly imitated Caribbean life. It is about the everyday business of living – whether it is at a panyard or at the beach, but it is also is about dying. Take his drawings of fish, dignified in death as they lie stranded on Caribbean shores, but blessed to have swum Caribbean waters. Isn’t this all to remind us just how fortunate we are as Caribbean peoples – to have been placed here to share this Eden-like biome? In so doing, he has helped to define us as a people in a special place. His brush strokes have spoken eloquently – not in the clear, clinical style of Naipaul, but more in that ethereal, poetical, wondrous Walcottian way.

Chancellor, if a picture paints a thousand words then Jackie has written volumes in an inimitable style. His inspired fourteen stations of the cross is a social commentary with the power to record the past, recognize the present and reveal the future.

He is to the visual arts what [Peter] Minshall is to mas and what Pat Bishop was to song. He is the last of that great triumvirate to be here summoned to be invested with our University’s highest honour.

His works have glorified Caribbean existence and with unique impressionism his lines have given form and forms to shape and shapes to movement that have enlightened and heightened our existence.

So receive him, Chancellor, and confer upon him the title of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.