Cayman.10--Miss Lassie

A real highlight of my trip was discovering Miss Lassie (Gladwyn Bush) at the National Gallery. Miss Lassie was a Caymanian folk painter who lived from 1914 to 2003.

Miss Lassie had no training as a painter and never painted at all until she had a vision in her 60s. After that, she painted everything in sight, including, so I hear, every part of her house.

She is quite a national character--I spoke to a young volunteer at the museum and she said that she often saw Miss Lassie painting on and around her house. When I asked about her, the volunteer said that there was a period in which Miss Lassie broke the top off of bottles and hung the bottles off of her fence to ward off evil spirits.

While some of her paintings deal with hurricanes that she lived through, the vast majority deal with moments from the Bible.



Her lack of training is evident from the pictures. The pictures are mostly flat, and the figures all look alike: the men all look like Jesus with their beard and mustache and center part. The women look like men, but without the facial hair.

But I love folk art--the patterns and the colors and the life.





I found her interpretations to be overwhelmingly positive--many of her pictures dealt with the moment in which a miracle was performed. Even her interpretation of Adam and Eve eating the fruit is positive--the thing that she focuses on is that "the fruit is good." And the scene is bright and sunny and flower-filled, even with the serpent nearby.



Her painting, "Calvary," is also eerily positive--there are flowers and blue skies and brightly-dressed worshipers.

But isn't there some truth in this imaginative vision?: the Christian understanding of sin and death is all in light of Christ's birth and resurrection.

The folk art sensibilities and the island-bright colors offer, I think, a fresh and true interpretation of Christianity.



This one is my favorite for the perspective and the colors. It depicts Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the man with feet of clay (they look like feet of flippers to me). This picture reminds me a bit of Van Gogh and some of his dizzyingly drawn interior spaces.