REVIEW John Lyons: ‘Carnivalesque’ at The Whitworth

Kirsty Jukes

Art historian and writer Kirsty Jukes reviews John Lyons’ first major retrospective exhibition surveying six decades of his contribution to British art, literature and art education. ‘Carnivalesque’ at The Whitworth, Manchester celebrates the development of his intuitive style and the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago. Bringing together over 80 artworks, with many not seen in decades, ‘Carnivalesque’ illuminates Lyons’ rich practice at a timely moment in his long career. Kirsty was fortunate to interview the artist and ask more about his life and inspirations. ‘Carnivalesque’ is available to view for free until 25 August 2024.

“Carnival is indeed a cathartic expressive yearly ritual of rhythmic, sensual joy, which generates psychologically a strength to cope with the difficulties of a life in Trinidad and Tobago against the background of a colonial history.” (*)

John Lyons was born in Trinidad in October, 1933, a critical and restless period in the country's history. At that time, his homeland was a British colony with few workers’ rights, its valuable assets such as cacao and oil being exploited by the Crown and American industrial interests. Earlier in the year of his birth in Port of Spain, the National Unemployed Movement organised a hunger march through the city demanding relief for unemployed people. This was the beginning of a series of spontaneous civil uprisings that would result in the establishment of trade unions. 1933 also saw the Tuesday night hurricane sweep through the south-east of the  island during the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record (1). It may be said that Lyons was born in turbulent times.

Raised by his parents until the age of nine, Lyons’ mother then passed away from a short illness. Along with his three siblings, the young Lyons moved to rural Tobago to live with his grandmother. Age 15 he returned to Port of Spain to live with his father and stepmother. His father developed his own independent shoe-making business on the city’s Queen Street, where he employed staff and made hand-crafted footwear for the local people. Lyons has vivid memories of standing on the pavement as a young boy outside his father’s business watching the Carnival parade pass by with his siblings.

Lyons’ interest in the arts was always present in his life. He often lost himself in reading and was forever drawing in his textbooks and on the apartment walls of his home. His uncle made him his first easel and painting became a major focus. He was inspired by small picture books he found in a Port of Spain bookshop showing the works of Hogarth, Rubens, and El Greco; and in the Trinidad National Museum and Art Gallery the work of fellow Trinidadian Michel-Jean Cazabon who became his absent tutor (2).

Aged 25, Lyons moved to the UK to study art after being accepted into Goldsmiths College in London. He worked extremely hard to be able to pay for his travel and tuition, often coming up against the overt racism of mid-Century British attitudes to newcomers to the country which would often plunge him into depression. He found it difficult to obtain and retain work but managed to get through using the lessons taught to him by his wise father who passed away during this period. Lyons, broke and struggling, was unable to get home for his funeral but remembers the lessons he and his family taught him as key to his success over adversity.

After much perseverance, Lyons graduated with a National Diploma of Design in 1964. He later became a teacher, spending a significant period in Manchester secondary schools and lecturing in Art and Design at South Trafford College. He also co-founded Hourglass Studio Gallery in Hebden Bridge, all the while developing a significant body of poetry, paintings and prints. His work is held in the public collections of Arts Council National Collection, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Rochdale Art Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Word and Image Print Collection. Now 90 years old, Lyons has his first major retrospective, Carnivalesque, in a city he knows very well. A form of second-homecoming for an overlooked pioneer of colourful and personal histories.

Carnivalesque sits astride the largest combined space at the Whitworth, Galleries 6, 7 and 8 at the rear of the building’s ground floor. The scope of the exhibition is extensive and important. Split thematically, the exhibition has three distinct areas from the artist’s oeuvre. Lyons’ boldly vibrant multi-disciplinary work jubilantly announces itself throughout the white cube gallery space, each piece vying for individual attention. Room 1, titled Carnivalesque focuses on Lyons’ formative years in Port of Spain. As is indicated in the name, all paintings, prints, drawings and accompanying poetry in this room convey an artistic interest in carnival over the decades fuelled by a childhood absorbed in its customs. Room 2, The Language of Painting traces Lyons’ development of his own distinct artistic language between the 1960s and 2000s. After arriving in London in 1959 to study, Lyons experimented with form and style to create a uniquely intuitive vision of the world taking part in many exhibitions around the country.

Finally, Room 3 Finding the Self in Folklore is a survey of Lyons’ deep connection to nature and the influence of Trinidadian mythology and folklore on his art since the mid-1980s. Here, viewers will find themselves amongst a heady mix of the artist's dreams, visions and fantasies alongside a case of his collected studio trinkets - found or made objects that inspire his process. All artworks were created between 1964 and 2024, the majority being paintings or poetry. The latter is a thread leading from one room to the next and is either displayed large on the gallery wall or heard through headphones in the artist's gentle dialect. This retrospective is a unique chance to appreciate Lyons for the important artist he is both to art history and present, as a skilled writer and orator and as a generous teacher of Trinidadian life, language and customs.

Room 1 - Carnivalesque

Stepping into the exhibition to be greeted by a well-researched biography and timeline of Lyons’ many achievements will be welcome in making Carnivalesque accessible to those unfamiliar with his work. This is something that The Whitworth is consistently excellent at doing. I feel a huge sense of physical joy and well-being entering the first space and looking from one work to the next, restrained only by the silent attention of other people in the room. My face aches with a smile I can’t suppress and my eyes are wide, drinking in every tone, every hue, every shade in each artwork. Lyons’ supreme skill at combining colour is exquisite. He uses bright flashes to highlight and complementary tones for shadow. Rarely is there a hint of black paint except for hair or to add an air of evil to hags and devils.

“In my passion for colour, I work with the whole spectrum on my palette. My approach to the use of colour is intuitive, inspired by the subject matter of what I am working on.” (*)

The origins of carnival in Trinidad and Tobago can be found in the late-eighteenth century during a period of Spanish and French occupation. White settlers and free people of colour would hold elaborate masquerade balls and the slaves, who at that time could not take part in the celebrations, would observe them, often through windows, deciding to hold celebrations of their own. These happened during the burning and harvesting period for sugar cane, and consequently became known as ‘cannes bruleés’ and eventually ‘Canboulay.’ The celebrations would include dancing, singing, costumes and mockery of the people who held the masquerade balls (3).

One work that gives an example of this is Masquerading (1992), a large tableau of figures from Carnival rendered in a visceral rainbow palette. Cerulean washes over sea foam blue, fleshy peach is scorched by fiery orange and dioxazine violet blends with deep cadmium red. Lyons’ surreal marks swirl around peripheral figures as if they are phantoms conjured in a puff of smoke. Compositionally, this work is exciting as the crowd amasses to loom over the viewer looking just about ready to sweep them up in their clutches. There is something so menacing here turning the mood from joyful to alarming. Frozen in the middle of some energetic activity, the frantic poses shake with a vitality as if set to music.

“Music! I love all music. It is part of my creative understanding of movement and rhythm; and that too is a vital part when painting that affects me physically with its ephemerality. Sometimes I do find myself moving to rhythms with a brush in my hand.” (*)

In other works, a cheeky glint of mischief in the eyes is present, moving the viewer to a sense of the playfulness of some carnival figures. Frenetic dancing makes way for energetic leaping as figures tumble and roll around each other, their masked faces grinning or grimacing. In contrast, smaller works such as Ash Wednesday (2007) have a delicacy and stillness, a welcome eyewash between frenzied scenes. Carnival Spectator (2007) and Carnival Tourist (2018) give the viewer a glimpse behind the disguises of people in carnival parades. Just as vibrant as their costumed entertainers, these works show the viewer the importance of the everyman in the celebrations of Lyons’ homeland, observing proceedings, dressed in their best, just as Lyons and his family would have done.

Room 2 - The Language of Painting

The second space gives the viewer a visual timeline spanning 40 years in Lyons' practice. He began to move away from representation and to work on an analysis of his individual painterly language during his time at Goldsmiths College.

“I was weaned off my self-taught clever ability of representational art to a conceptual aspect  of abstraction. Being a writer of poetry, I was very much aware of a literary syntax; and it occurred to me as a visual language of expression, painting also has its syntax of line, shape, texture, colour in a notional, infinite space of a two-dimensional picture plane with infinite possibilities as a language.” (*)

It is a pleasure indeed to see an artist evolve in this way and have the opportunity to notice the emergence of his very specific style through exploration. At the start, European Modernism is clearly visible, especially in the use of Picasso’s stylisation of the figure in Marie Louise (1968) and the Bacon and Lassnig-esque distortion by abstraction of the human head in works such as The Embrace (c.1978-79) and Maternity Enigma (1979-80), albeit with astonishing colour and sharper line. He also explores religious iconography, political and cultural subject matter such as the Middle Passage, bondage, colonialism and the prison system. These works in particular add an area of pathos that helps to contextualise some of the nightmarish themes and in the rest of the exhibition. By understanding parts of Trinidadian history and its resulting culture, the origins of the region's folklore becomes more comprehensible. Walking further around the space one can then start to see the beginnings of a step into music, masquerade and mythology as well as experimentation with media.

It is this experimentation that gives the exhibition some of its most unexpected works. A playfully taunting resin mask of fellow poet Harold Massingham made from cloudy material flecked with bright colours which, when viewed from above, form clown make-up across the face, almost like a Carnival mask itself. Sacrificial I and II are mixed-media sculptures (specimens if you will) under bell-jars made from collected bones and shells. They are animalistic in their representation and seem to be three dimensional incarnations of the fantastical creatures to come in the next room. There are also cases of written materials relating to exhibitions, publications, anthologies and notebooks. These include items from Lyons personal archive adding context to his place in the art landscape of the time and offering a welcome insight into his draughtsmanship and penmanship.

“It was appropriate to include printed evidence of my wider contributive involvement with matters of visual art, workshops, lectures, etc. Being a poet with many publications, plus contributions to anthologies, some selected poems on display, related to exhibits, represent an added relevant dimension to the exhibition as a whole.” (*)

Room 3 - Finding the Self in Folklore

In the final space, the eye is met by a phantasmagoria of figures from Trinidadian folklore. Here the colour and energy are pitched at their highest in forms that are the visual contemporary counterparts of mediaeval grotesques or violent Biblical scenes: a cautionary tale told to keep equilibrium and explain hardships. Trinidad has a rich folklore history influenced by a vast array of ethnic groups living there over time. Colonialism, indentured servitude and slavery meant that the indigenous population of First Peoples in the country were subject to decimation and those left were joined by people from Africa, India, Europe, and China in mass migrations of populations to serve the colonisers. This created a melting pot of cultures each with their own legends and customs. What threads through the narratives of these stories is a will to work with nature and warnings to anyone who disobeys, a way of rationalising the dangers and inequality of the world. For Lyons, folklore is clearly an important part of his upbringing and adult life as an artist. The apparitions seem as muses through which he can interpret his dreams and visions.

Examples of some of the characters visible here are The Curse of La Diablesse (1992) which shows a half woman, half demon seductress with a cloven hoof on one foot belching out blue birds over a prone victim. The First Soucouyant (1993) contains the man-eating sorcerer who appears as an older woman able to shed her skin and turns into a fireball at night. Obeahman as Muse (c.2002) and Obeahwoman Scrapbook of Spells (2005) both contain mischievous figures who harness supernatural forces against the living, steal shadows and cure disease amongst many other things. These figures in particular are known throughout Africa and the Caribbean, playing the role of inspirational leader able to entice his entourage, which might number in the thousands, to partake in resistance and rebellions (4). This was particularly useful as a way of mythologising slave uprisings.

Throughout the entire exhibition however, there is one character that keeps appearing. Jumbie Birds are most commonly associated with the Ferruginous Pygmy Owl, a small owl species with markings that look like eyes in the back of its head. Aside from the frightening illusion that they can see when their backs are turned, startling yellow eyes and a tiny stature have caused them to be seen as spirits of the deceased unable to find their final resting place. This stems from the African and indigenous Caribbean belief in an afterlife and the presence of spirits in the physical realm. As a being wise with knowledge of both worlds, the light of day and the dark of night, it seems that Lyons affinity with this particular animal links back to the lessons of his father in many ways.

“The folklore figure I most identify with is the owl, the jumbie bird. It is a creature of the dark and the light, living a mysterious, liminal life.” (*)

A final look into the world of Lyons comes in the form of a glass case filled with collected items from his studio. There are mannequins in masks, bone fragments, shells, beads, glass prisms, gnarled wood, dried seeds and nuts, statuettes and much more. Seeing these items presented here gives a window into the artist's mind, a man inspired by everything around him. Just as the texts in Room 2 were important to understand the technical process of his work, this display contextualises his creative mindset and process perfectly. It is a treat that not many have the opportunity to see and Lyons’ open honesty about his entire career is what makes this exhibition really special.

“With the eye of an artist I see new life, the resurrection of possibilities in found objects.” (*)

An astounding achievement, ‘Carnivalesque’ manages to provide a wonderful insight into a talented artist's life and his work. Without too much additional text, Lyons’ own words and images are left to speak for themselves. This allows a development of narrative similar to the way in which the artist himself conjures his imagery - a dream-like state of mind that drifts from words to pictures, linking comfort to sudden fright, entwining past experience with fantasy. The mind is free to see what it wants. This is an extensive show and one that has stayed with me for all the days since I saw it. A second or third visit will certainly be needed to drink all of it in and very welcome it will be too.

With thanks to John Lyons for being so inspiring and generous with his time in agreeing to speak with me for this review.

All images: John Lyons, Carnivalesque. The Whitworth. 2024

‘Carnivalesque’ runs until Sunday 25 August 2024 at The Whitworth. For further details please see:

John Lyons: Carnivalesque (whitworth.manchester.ac.uk)

Footnotes

(*) All quotations - John Lyons, taken from an interview between Kirsty Jukes and John Lyons, 6 July 2024

(1) LINKER, JOSH, ‘Why This Hurricane Season Isn't as Active as It Seems’, Bay News 9, 2020.

(2) FUNK, RAY, ‘Trinidad artist, writer John Lyons getting renewed attention in England’, Newsday, 2022 - Trinidad artist, writer John Lyons getting renewed attention in England - Trinidad and Tobago Newsday

(3) MAHARAJ, CANDICE, The Origins and Evolution of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, Retrospective Journal, 2018 - https://retrospectjournal.com/2018/11/11/the-origins-and-evolution-of-carnival-in-trinidad-and-tobago-2/

(4) GIRALDO, ALEXANDER, Obeah: The Ultimate Resistance, Religion and Resistance, 2000 - Religion and Resistance (miami.edu)