Edna bursary gets boost from ‘successful’ auction

Patrons were treated to an enjoyable evening as the art auction, wine and cheese party morphed into much more with a car show and live band at Fort Charles, Stony Hill, last Saturday. With 34 of 50 pieces of paintings and sculptures sold, Marvin Hall is describing it as a major success.

Hosted by the Liguanea Lodge, the event is its major fundraiser, part proceeds of which go towards maintaining a bursary for a student at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in St Andrew. This year some of the money will also go towards establishing an art prize for an exceptional artist, to help him or her to establish themselves, after leaving school.

“We did pretty well and it’s our most successful auction event in terms of art sales,” he told The Gleaner. “We had a lot more higher priced pieces this year and we focused all the more on the quality of the art that we had in the auction. It was a mixture of the old masters and contemporaries.”

The show, which is in its 30th year, saw the pieces from the old masters such Girl with Jar and Fruits, a 1952 oil on hardboard painting by Albert Huie along with a piece by mixed media on board piece from John Dunkley which was done in the 1940s for which the minimum bid was US$35,000, as well as another piece also with no title, an oil on canvas painting done Whitney Miller in 1956.

MINIMUM BID

Barrington Watson’s 1993 oil on canvas painting Bathers at River had a minimum bid set at US$40,000

Representing for the contemporaries was Ebony Patterson, an artist who works between Jamaica and the United States of America whose three-panel mixed media on paper, Study for Di Real Big Man, for which the bidding started at US$4,500.

Kimani Beckford was among the newer artists who also impressed with pieces such as Portrait of Nathaniel Smith an oil on canvas painting which was done this year.

Overall, it was an exciting mix of paintings and sculptures which was well attended and supported and provided much food for thought as patrons compared the different styles and nuances, conceptualised in the minds of artists of yore and today and shaped by their hands.