A Pottinger master piece. It was exhibited at the 'Forerunners: First & Second Generation' at the Mutual Life Gallery & Art Centre Ltd. - Contributed

David "Jack" Pottinger, veteran painter of views of downtown Kingston for the past sixty years, died on February 13. He was 95 years of age.

Pottinger, considered by many as one of Jamaica's finest painters, was a central figure in the early defining years of the nationalist movement in art which developed under the influence of Edna and Norman Manley at 'Drumblair' and at the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica in downtown Kingston.

Pioneering artists

In the early 1940s, Pottinger, then in his early thirties, was befriended by Ralph Campbell, another of the pioneering artists, who took the young sign and house painter to the junior centre to participate in the classes then conducted by Edna Manley. Through Mrs. Manley's encouragement and tutorship in the essentials of drawing, Pottinger's talent blossomed and by 1945 he was producing works which stamped him out as a key figure of the "New Jamaican Painting."

For the next sixty years, Pottinger has continued to paint the street-life of downtown Kingston. As David Boxer, one of his great admirers has put it:

" If Huie is the rural landscapist of the nationalist movement par excellence then Pottinger can be defined as his urban counterpart. A self-portrait or two, a handful of landscapes usually drawn from the outskirts of Kingston, a few "still lifes" and fewer still religious paintings aside, Pottinger's life-work has been devoted to a single prescribed subject, but a subject of myriad possibilities: the streets and lanes, the sidewalks, buildings and backyards of old Kingston and the parade of walking, jostling, cart-pushing, higglering, swaying-to-the-spirit neighbours that move, squat, lounge, hawk, haggle on the byways of the old city where he was born. This prescribed subject and the consistency and quality of his vision are the principal characteristics of his art."

One-man exhibitions

Although he was a regular exhibitor in the Institute of Jamaica's 'All-Island Exhibitions of Painting' and the National Gallery's 'National Exhibitions', he held few one-man exhibitions in the 60 years of his career, notably at Bolivar Gallery in 1974 and 1977 and at the Mutual Life Gallery in 1988 and 1990. In 2001, to mark his 90th birthday, the National Gallery mounted a full scale retrospective of his work.

Pottinger who received a silver Musgrave medal in 1987 and the Order of Distinction the same year, was awarded a Gold Musgrave medal in 2002.

During this period his palette darkened, nay brooded. Colour stopped being merely functionally descriptive and began to be truly emotive. Brushstrokes became more and more impassioned while expressive distortions such as the attenuated figures which we find in his '60s masterwork Walk Tall enter his work. All this turned him into a true poet of paint and into an authentic Jamaican master.

Later, decades would see him abandoning what for him were radical distortions, and returning to his earlier style. But he did so now with a far more accomplished, indeed vibrant, use of paint, both in terms of colour and in terms of the vitality of his brushstrokes. His compositions grew in complexity, tied now to a more rigid geometric underlay. With this rejuvenated realism he has continued to this day to elaborate his theme of the street-sides of Kingston.

David Pottinger is survived by two sisters, nieces and nephews, and by his many friends, among them administrators at the Institute of Jamaica and his caregiver Joan. He will be mourned as well by a host of well-wishers, lovers of Jamaican art and collectors of his works. Funeral arrangements will be announced at a later date.

- National Gallery Of Jamaica Tribute