THE National Gallery recently honoured the pioneer Jamaican painter David Pottinger with a retrospective exhibition of his life's work in this his 90th year.

He has been painting since the early 1940s and the Gallery mounted a comprehensive exhibition by which we may evaluate his work encompassing 60-odd years. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, which includes an essay and interview with the artist by its curator Irina Leyva.

On viewing the exhibition it is immediately evident that David Pottinger is a major artist and with serious and honest investigation it also becomes clear that, although he is basically self-taught, he is a master in the Western Art Tradition. Pottinger is not a genre painter. His paintings do not subscribe to literal translations of a scene and narrative is never expressed by mere description. He is essentially a painter of landscapes, particularly urban landscapes, acting as a Freudian couch from which he evaluates and seeks to transform his social environment. Unlike all his contemporaries of the so-called nationalist school (with the exception of Henry Daley), Pottinger's stylistic approach was forged through a very deep and sincere dialogue with his subject matter. And despite efforts by the curator to state otherwise in the catalogue, it was this dialogue that was most instructive for his talent. As a result, his best work is free of pretensions and audacious in its representation, presenting a challenge to and confrontation of the prevailing views and values of the time and perhaps, largely, even of today.

There have been significant shifts in Pottinger's aesthetic approach over the years, which ably testify to his boldness of spirit. In the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, his masterful comprehension of light and atmospheric space is achieved by a sophisticated manipulation of neutralised colour and tones. His 1948-49 landscape is a bucolic masterpiece. Its realism seems effortlessly achieved and a rustic familiarity emanates from the scene. He very successfully negotiates the difficult terrain with its landfall and burly mountains rising in the rear.

"Cook Out", one of three master works of 1945, is unique. It is a painting of mythic proportions that transcends time and space. The scene we witness could easily be taking place in Ghana or Zimbabwe or Jamaica. We are shown groups of black people preparing a meal using African methods. They are characterised as powerful and proud. Perhaps it is the community of Juan de Sierras (John of the mountain), who in 1660 fought and defied both the Spaniards and the British as well as the traitor Juan de Bolas to live free and independent in the hills of St Catherine long before the compromised Maroons.

The people who inhabit the best of the early urban landscapes exude a quietly heroic and enduring nature. The painterly moulding of form and modelling of light, the corporeal permanence and symmetry of figures are expressive of a survival and triumph of both body and spirit. Here we have the high point of Pottinger's realism. Downtown Kingston is, in fact, the place where the influence of Marcus Garvey, the man who sought to return to Blacks their lost dignity, was most deeply felt. It was Garvey's civil rights movement -- co-opted by Bustamante in the late thirties -- that was the thrust of the labour movement and uprisings of the period. Race feeling was very strong and Pottinger, like the shaman, conduit of vision and a larger consciousness, was a part of this milieu.

"Backyard", another of the masterpieces of 1945 (the other being "Bread sellers"), presents us with an important communal ritual and vocation (which today seems under threat of extinction) -- the plaiting of a little girl's hair. Off to the side are three figures engaged in another form of ritual communion. The painting's aura is of a religious icon depicting sacred activity.

"Nine Night", done in 1949, is another major work by the master. In the catalogue's essay, this painting has been associated with the bastard religious ceremony of Pocomania, but interestingly enough, Pottinger chose to name the painting after a ceremony representative of a purer cultural form. In reality, nine night has nothing to do with Pocomania per se and in both structure and rationale is African not Christian. The whole painting is constructed along two co-ordinates. The vertical represented by the lighted pole and mirrored by the large upright female figure towards the centre, whose stance is emphasised by the upward thrust of her pyramidal head wrap. The second is a horizontal defined by the almost uniform height of the procession of worshippers on the sidewalk itself. This reinforces the Africanness (as against Jamaicanness) of the scene.

Ute Stebich states in Black Art in the Caribbean: "The dominant figure is vertical, while the line of the bowl is horizontal. In Vodum, vertical images represent the world of spirits while horizontal ones represent the four directions of the sky. The fifth point is where the two worlds converge and where the Vodum ceremony must occur."

Thus the painting transcends the recording of "the folk" and their retentions, to immerse us, like the participants, in the dark womb of Africans' axiology and epistemology.

The sixties and seventies saw extremely radical shifts in Pottinger's work. Early indications of these changes can clearly be seen in the Trench Town paintings of 1959 and 1963. In these paintings, Pottinger begins the elongation of forms that is a signature feature of his second period. He also begins to greatly animate the images in his painting.

His brush stroke changes, becoming more expressive of energy and movement but he is never expressionist. He begins to use black paint to "colour" his figures. People, trees and buildings are rendered less naturalistically. Transformed to their essentials, their metaphorical nature is increased. Pottinger darkens not only his figures, but also the entire painting, the whole atmosphere becoming suffused with a kind of black light. His second Trench Town painting is amazing in its simultaneous expression of oppressive confinement and an explosive release. In the foreground, the "Blackman" has literally begun to rise up! This was the time of the Black civil rights struggle in the USA, of Malcolm X and Black Power. In Jamaica, this resulted in the resurgence of Garveyism at the national level and a renewed interest in Africa. The period was marked by, among many other things, the expulsion of Walter Rodney from the island for allegedly promoting Black Power and by the growth of popular support for the anti-apartheid movement.

Pottinger's genius is that he has given visual expression to Marcus Garvey's imperative ideological prescription, "Up, up, you mighty race". What's more, he has done so without sloganeering. His commanding, confrontational masterpiece of 1969, entitled "Walk Tall", typifies, par excellence, most of his aesthetic concerns of the period. For the first time, the format of the painting (which is tall and narrow) is used as an aesthetic device as it was obviously deliberately selected. The erect central figure soars to the sky and even the buildings torpedo upwards towards the firmament. Not being the opportunistic observation of a patronising upper class, Pottinger's paintings go beyond journalism and the recording of mere racial "arousal". Rather, it is a prescription for action. Its message is a projectile; flung from the present, towards a possible future and ignored at the people's own peril.

In no uncertain terms, David Pottinger establishes that his is a voice distinctly different from that of the so-called nationalist school. His work represents what Rex Nettleford, writing in the catalogue of the Intuitive Eye exhibition, calls "... that aesthetic certitude which must be rooted in our own potential if the world is to take us seriously as creators rather than imitators".

In the paintings of the 80s and 90s, Pottinger's figures lose their previous stature. Light and space are no longer negotiated by the subtle modulations of tone and hue. There is a loss of values. Colours become superficial and decorative and are little more than a filling for shapes. There is very little sensitive observation of line and contour and proportions suffer a loss of symmetry as is easily observed in the latter Pocomania paintings.

CONTRIVED and sapped of true feeling and energy, these paintings cease to resonate and have become expressive of a banal existence. Yet this was, in fact, truly reflective of the national reality, socially, culturally and politically. The triumph of the "Reagan years" resulted in the entrenchment of a crass commercialism in Jamaican society and brought a greater impetus towards culture and specifically art as commodity.

Pottinger may have succumbed to the aesthetic bludgeoning of the art market, unfriendly as it was (and still is) to anything that it could not define in the image of the metropole or reduce to craft or kitch, but his decline is the society's decline.

Nonetheless in the 1987 painting, "Coal yard at Spanish Town", the artist's genius surfaces. The scene is of a coal yard on Spanish Town Road, downtown Kingston, which no longer exists. It is his largest work, measuring 119 cm by 254 cm and was commissioned by its present owner, whose only request of Pottinger was that he represent an extinct Jamaican activity. The painting is a metaphorical tour de force. We are presented with a grand scene of desolation and decay. The clashing and contradictory perspective and scale, within which the group of people, who crowd the painting's fore and middle ground, and even the buildings, seek to exist, communicates a sense of confusion and a loss of direction. Self-immolation is suggested by ill-proportioned, ill-formed bodies and is amplified by the very unnatural rendering of skin. Pottinger accurately envisions the social and physiological vandalism (anti-social music, skin bleaching, hair bleaching, etc) that became rooted in the society, increasing in the ensuing years. Cultural dissolution surely marks the route to extinction. Consigned to a wretched peripheral existence, the people busily proceed to sell their essence, their coal (soul) in a barren land with a barren horizon.

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