Brown captures do
This is the fourth of a 10-part series presented by the Jamaica Observer highlighting the murals which form a public art installation along Water Lane in downtown Kingston. The initiative forms part of the Paint the City project being curated by non-profit arts organisation Kingston Creative.
AT the heart of Bryton Brown’s mural titled Water Lane Derby is nostalgia. In his statement of intent to the team at Kingston Creative, the Manchester-born Brown noted that his mural design would focus on using different elements from a Jamaican childhood experience, to include toys, games, and food items, as well as aspects of downtown Kingston that he encountered to create a dream-like fantasy composition.
That was his original plan. However, he had to abort the dream, fantasy element and just stick to the childhood reflection aspect of the work.
“I just said to myself this has to be something that kids would enjoy and so I just went ahead with creating the work which is my first mural,” said the graduate of the school of art at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, who specialises in printmaking, illustration and photography.
Central to his ‘downtown derby’ is the racetrack, something he borrowed from his own childhood, having been inspired by the popular video game series Mario Kart. He then included local elements to make the mural more relatable to the local culture and audience.
“I am by nature a very detail-oriented person. I pay attention to the finer points of the elements in everything that I do. The track is inspired by the colourful bricks used along Temple Lane. I used box trucks on my racetrack as part of the fantasy and the nostalgia. Then I thought would it be cool to add other things that children use as cars, so that’s where thing like the wheelbarrow, go karts and I even used a barrel and turned it into a car.”
“My love of Japanese art made me think of lanterns floating in the air. But I swapped the lanterns for marbles. Then I added some buildings to give the work some depth and make it more like downtown Kingston… a lot of buildings and very little open space.
However, in this case I didn’t want the buildings to be too prominent, just enough for variety and contrast,” Brown shared with the
Jamaica
Observer.