Jane Eyre: Caribbean Drawings

An introductory essay and over eighty drawings by Rex Dixon linking Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea:

Jane Eyre: Caribbean Drawingsby Rex Dixon
Introductory Essay by Patricia Mohammed
Maracas Valley Studio Production
ISBN: 978-976-8280-9-6
September 2019

In Jane Eyre: Caribbean Drawings, Rex Dixon, British born artist, adds his aesthetic reading to Charlotte Brontë’s classic book, with an introductory essay and over eighty drawings in pen and ink with gouache. Resident in the Caribbean for nearly four decades, Dixon brings his lived experience of Jamaica that has only been imagined by Brontë and creates a fantastical visual diary. He invokes the prequel that this novel has inspired, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, as a window into his inventive pen to release these demons of past and present time, of stored up histories and literary ghosts that is as much about his migration and displacement, as it is the novelists and characters in these novels.

Literary scholar Dr. Jean Antoine-Dunne comments that “The drawings in Dixon’s work signify the desire to go beyond the boundaries of accepted reality and to do so by exploring the interstices or the in-between shadow shapes of existence through a form of dream work; Figures dart out from the corners of experience as they become nudged into new meanings by epiphanic moments of recognition on reading a literary text. Phantasmagorical shapes that come from the artist’s musings crowd the boundaries of the page and here feminist scholar Patricia Mohammed’s interpretations and gloss of the work provide fruitful points of entry. The ship is key -– harking to the journeys of the author Jean Rhys who left Dominica to travel to England, and that of the artist Rex Dixon who left England to travel to the Caribbean. But it is also about the Brontë sisters who are claimed by both Ireland and England, and whose writings are very much about mind journeying”.

About the Author: Rex Dixon moved to Jamaica from the United Kingdom in 1985 to teach painting at the Edna Manley School of Visual and Performing Arts. He lived first in Jamaica and moved to the southern Caribbean two decades later setting up his studio in Maracas Valley in Trinidad. In Modern Jamaican Art (1998) Veerle Poupeye writes: “The English painter Rex Dixon who came to Jamaica in 1985 after living in Belfast, Northern Ireland for several years, is arguably the most notable expatriate artist to settle in Jamaica…. Dixon's paintings and works on paper are in essence visual diaries, in which he records his impressions and experiences by means of formal and informal abstract elements, fragmentary images and occasionally text”.

The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reviews the book:

Dixon reads Char­lotte Bronte's nov­el Jane Eyre through Jean Rhys' Wide Sar­gas­so Sea and finds cor­re­spon­dences in his own life and ca­reer. In adding his own per­son­al read­ing Dixon adds an­oth­er lay­er to the many read­ings and imag­in­ings that have been in­spired by a fe­male nov­el­ist who nev­er vis­it­ed the Caribbean, but whose nov­el evoked a pow­er­ful re­sponse by a Caribbean writer.
The draw­ings speak of Dixon's move­ment from Eng­land to North­ern Ire­land and to Ja­maica and then Trinidad. They are al­so ex­cur­sions in­to his ear­ly ca­reer as de­sir­ing writer and teacher. They are il­lu­mined by his read­ing of the nov­els and his re­search in­to the lives of these writ­ers. But they are al­so about mem­o­ry or even child­hood night­mares that sur­face like the ants crawl­ing across the pa­per in these draw­ings. Such mem­o­ries are sug­gest­ed by the re­peat­ed re­frain on p 33 'Char­lotte Char­lotte hold on tight in the mid­dle of the night'. (Dr. Jean Antoine-Dunne)