Cecil, a celebrated artist, educator, and tenor, will share with you his insights in a rap session on Saturday evening and then work with you on your personal pieces in a workshop on Sunday morning.

Born in the parish of Hanover in 1946, he was one of the first graduates of the full time diploma programme of the Jamaica School of Art (now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts) in 1966.  He was to return to the Jamaica School of Art to teach painting in 1980, becoming the head of the department the following year. However it was his talent as a classical musician that won him a Jamaican government scholarship to study music in New York in 1970. His sojourn in New York allowed him the opportunity to hone his skill in the visual arts. In 1976 he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, and later in 1993 the Master of Fine Arts degree from the same institution.

One of Jamaica’s most recognized artists, over the years in solo and group showings Cecil has exhibited in Jamaica and overseas in the USA, Canada, Germany, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. His writings have been published in newspapers, newsletters and other publications in Jamaica and the USA. In 1993 he was awarded the Bronze Musgrave Medal for his contribution to painting and art education in Jamaica.

In describing his work, the Savacou Gallery in New York in 2003 identified two trends: “One is the muscular dramatic, expressionist style he uses in his large canvasses and mixed media works on paper. The other is a graceful sensual style that is characteristic of his small works and painted objects”.

Born Alison Dawn Scott in Mandeville in 1951, Dawn Scott had her first exhibition in 1971, when she showed a group of paintings, drawings and sculptures at the United States Information Service in Kingston. She started producing figurative batik paintings in the mid 1970s and first exhibited these in 1975 at the Creative Arts Centre of the University of the West Indies Mona Campus. She also lived in Barbados in the late 1970s  and exhibited there at the Queen’s Park Gallery and Yoruba House in 1978.

Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at the Grosvenor Galleries in Kingston. By far her most impactful exhibition, however, was her contribution to Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), the National Gallery’s (and Jamaica’s) first exhibition of installation art. On this occasion, she produced A Cultural Object, a haunting, spiral-shaped “zinc fence” structure which transposed some of the realities of Jamaica’s inner city life into the gallery spaces of the National Gallery.

Dawn Scott has taught textile art at the School of Visual Arts, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, where she recently also served as an external examiner. She was also active as a fashion designer and her handmade, hand-dyed clothes were in great demand, locally, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Around 1980, she had been closely involved in the restoration of the Harmony Hall manse in Tower Isle, St Mary, and designed the ornamental fretwork for the building. Her long-standing interest in interior design and architectural detailing became her primary professional preoccupation in the latter years of her life and she was involved in major projects such as the Island Village in Ocho Rios and the Goldeneye Villas in Oracabessa, Portland, on both of which she collaborated with the acclaimed Jamaican architect Ann Hodges. Each of these projects adapted aspects of Jamaica’s architectural heritage in a contemporary context.

Dawn Scott received the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary Medal in 1979 and a Bronze Musgrave Medal for merit in the Visual Arts in 1999.