As a child growing up in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930s and 40s, John Lyons’ imagination was electrified by his homeland’s folklore, beliefs and rituals. There was the jumbie-owl, a ghost bird or harbinger of death, who flew between the world of spirits and the living, and the soucouyant, an elderly woman who wreaks havoc as a flying nocturnal fireball-vampire. And there were the real-world devils, painted blue and red, molasses or tar-smeared, lashing whips that recalled plantation-owner brutality, encountered at carnival. “They were part of my consciousness and lived as a visceral reality from a tender age,” he says today.
The artist’s major touring survey, Carnivalesque, conjures these figures in paintings using lush brushwork in heated colours, directing their disruptive energy into unsettling scenes that can be ecstatic or brooding, threatening or jubilant. Beginning with work from 1964, when Lyons graduated from south London’s Goldsmiths’ College, it chronicles six decades of his development as a painter and award-winning poet. In an art world that had been largely deaf to Black voices until the sea change wrought by Black Lives Matter, it is also, incredibly, something of a big break for the 91-year-old. “It’s a strange, humbling experience,” he says. “It is as though I’m looking at the work of someone else on the walls.”
