ABOUT CHANDIS BECKFORD

Multi-disciplinary artist in Fine Art Painting

Co-founder of Pum Pum Poetry and Pottery

Making

Chandis Beckford is a multi-disciplinary artist in Fine Art painting, as well as co-founder of Pum Pum Poetry and pottery making, popularizing the draped hypertufa technique here in Jamaica. Her paintings utilize the female archetype and body as well as Jamaican cultural references to explore and visually discuss aspects of sexuality, spirituality and the everyday human experience. Working in a combined figuritave and expressionistic style with acrylic mediums, yarn and artificial silk flowers her paintings are bold and provocative. She has exhibited locally and internationally having one of her sculptural paintings titled ‘Pum Pum Petals: Pearls of Innocence’ as a permanent part of the Imago Mundi - Luciano Benetton Collection, Italy, 2017.

Her writings have been included in hardcopy magazines, online features and the book Caribbean Etotic - poetry, prose and essays, an anthology of Caribbean authors and most months she features her art pottery as a part of the Kingston Creative ArtWalk.

Eye of the Beholder

Chandis Beckford

Acrylic, yarn, silk flowers on canvas

30’” x 25” Visit

Nature, ever graceful yet pragmatic, determines that the seed must die in order to germinate. So too was Cecil’s transitioning graceful and impactful - a simultaneous passing and ancestral ‘spirit resurrection’. Through his accomplishments, he has left a colossal void, but he has passed on the proverbial baton of his unique artistic force.

Cooper’s contributions continue, as manifested in this auspicious occasion at Olympia Gallery, June through July 2022. He continues, from the beyond, his duty as a culture guru with an expansive definition of what constitutes Jamaican art patronage: taking on anArtists’ role as ‘patron’ through ‘philanthropy’.

He not only accumulated wealth but continues to share its bounty. In his passing, many are simultaneously healed. He has left behind numerous paintings and drawings, which speak to an immense and inexhaustibly fascinating legacy, forever worthy of examination. His lingering presence affords opportunities to young artists without the means to receive a proper education through his financial generosity. Therefore, he has a perpetual, exuberant presence and a spirit that possesses and lives within us all. Through him, many lives have changed and will change for the better - forever.

Cooper did his “Last Dance” (acrylic on canvas, 2003) while we were not watching. He spoke prophetically and quietly and created one of his final masterpieces, a major large-scale work as a final and profound rite of passage... a silky white dove, resting on the shoulder of the protagonist, a mark of selection - noting that the subject would shortly be at final rest, and the bird, its mission complete,

USA