LLEWELLYN XAVIER BIOGRAPHY

Llewellyn Xavier is a multimedia artist who was born in Saint Lucia in 1945.

In 1962, he left Saint Lucia for Barbados to work as an agricultural apprentice. When a friend gave him a box of watercolours, he found his calling.

His first exhibition of figurative landscapes was a success. He began to establish a reputation in the Caribbean.

In 1968, Llewellyn Xavier moved to England, where he pioneered mail art.

In 1979, He enrolled in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

He spent time as a Cistercian monk in Montreal before returning to Saint Lucia in 1987 where he met his future wife, Christina.

One of Xavier’s most important works is an immense series of collages created that he began in 1993.

Entitled Global Council for Restoration of the Earth’s Environment, the series was first shown at the Patrick Cramer Gallery in Geneva.

The collages incorporate all manner of recycled materials, including naturalist prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and postage stamps from many countries. They also include signatures of world’s foremost environmentalists and conservationists.

Llewellyn Xavier is also well known for his oil paintings, characterized by multicoloured pearls of paint applied to the surface of the canvas using a series of special tools and a technique that he has developed over the past few decades.

The brilliant palettes of the paintings draw inspiration from the Caribbean environment in which Xavier lives and works.

During his lengthy career which spans more than 60 years, Llewellyn Xavier has also produced drawings, watercolours and mixed media works.

In 2004, Xavier received the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in recognition of his contribution to the art of the Commonwealth.

He is the founder of the Saint Lucia Sculpture Park that is intended to bring public art to the landscape of the island.

Llewellyn Xavier’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others.

In 2016 he was honored with a solo exhibition at Phillips in New York.

At the opening of the exhibition, Edward Dolman, the CEO of Phillips, called Xavier “one of the greatest artists ever to emerge from the Caribbean...a dynamic voice in the dialogue between globalization and localism.”