Interview with… Jamaican visual artist Richard Nattoo
Richard Nattoo is a multidisciplinary artist born and based in Kingston, Jamaica. His work encompasses a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and textile art, reflecting his broad artistic vision. Profoundly influenced by his Jamaican heritage and a deep-seated connection to nature, Nattoo's oeuvres delves into complex themes of identity, memory, and spirituality. He employs storytelling—a fundamental aspect of Jamaican culture—as a central narrative device within his work. His art, often characterized by its dark, yet magical and dreamlike qualities, underscores the significance of emotional authenticity, seeking to evoke a profound resonance with both personal and collective experiences. Through his artistic endeavors, Nattoo aims to recover and reanimate stories that have been marginalized or erased by colonialism, offering them anew to the world as a means of cultural preservation and remembrance.
Segolene Py: Please present yourself in a few words.
Richard Nattoo: I am Richard Nattoo, I am a visual artist. My practice consists mainly of painting, sculpting, and recently, exploring textile work. I consider myself primarily as a storyteller. I like to tell stories with my work, retell stories that have been forgotten over time, or have been repressed due to colonialism. I'm interested in magical realism through a Caribbean lens. I'm looking into a lot of Caribbean folklore, more specifically Jamaican folklore, and try to bring light to and reimagine a lot of these stories within my work. The very root my work is about remembering, and I'm remembering all these different aspects of myself and my history.
SP: How did you start practicing? how did you start thinking art was the way to go for you?
RN: It started when I was about four. I was watching this program called Pappyland, where the host would draw something at the end of the show, and it would come to life. I saw the host draw Peacock, and my mom said, ‘Oh, that looks that looks interesting’. She gave me, a pen and pencil. I followed the host’s instructions step by step to draw a peacock. That sparked a new life inside me, seeing that I could create something and make a new life out of it.
SP: The peacock is a recurring character that comes into your work.
RN: It has become a dominant animal or message within my work. It almost speaks about a germination; it’s a datum point. A lot of times in my work, you see the peacock looking back like the Sankofa bird. I did that a lot. I honour that first experience, and it comes out in the work that I do now.
Since then, I kept on drawing. It brought me happiness and tranquillity. I became the artist of the class, the person everybody would come to whenever there was a joint assignment. At some point, even teachers would ask for my help to draw scientific diagrams on cartridge paper, which got hung up in the class. In a way, those were my first exhibitions. It gave me a lot of confidence and something special in what I was doing. I kept doing that until I went to high school, which was a humbling experience. I was great at drawing but I saw other kids around my age who were way more advanced than me. I had to find a way to push myself. I started to take it a lot more seriously because, for the first time in my life, there was competition, but there was also a community. I could really speak to other artists. how they do certain things and learn from them. I kept growing and kept evolving. There were some points where, back in high school, I got unmotivated just because of how good these kids were, and it didn't look like I was catching up to them anytime soon or anytime at all. I remember one of my teacher told to me: “Don't focus on that. All you need to do is to keep on drawing, just don't stop.” And that's what I did. Some of these same kids I used to look up to are now looking up to me because I took it seriously and furthered my career into it.
A big part of my development is when I met my best friend and rival, Michael Talbot. We took the same bus to school, and shared similar ideas and interests, especially inspirations like Bill Waterson – a cartoonist who did Calvin and Hobbes, a story with a little boy and a tiger. Waterson used a lot of watercolours in his work, something me and Micheal really enjoyed. We shared different books and comic books and decided to push each other and grow together. Eventually, we did an exhibition together, and later with another friend, Hakeem Walters (rest in peace), we did a first exhibition called Just Passion.
SP : How old were you at that time?
RN: We were between 17 or 18 when I did my first proper exhibition. After that I went on to study architecture. Michael went to study art in Boston. So, he migrated, and I stayed in Jamaica. I was still painting. In 2013, I did an exhibition as a part of a festival called Kingston on the Edge, which was my first solo exhibition experience. After that, I participated in that exhibition every year as part of the festival. I eventually became one of the directors of the festival, helping to put it all together. All the experience that I had putting on my own shows, plus experience I got from being an intern the National Gallery, I used it to help other artists put on their own shows.
Later, I finished architecture school but was still making work and exhibiting because it was important for me. I didn't ever want to feel like I was selling out my dream per se, even though I had this 9 to 5 job. It was important for me to feed that dream. In 2021, I left my job in the field of architecture and became a full-time artist. Things started to really take flight and shape. More opportunities came, including international ones.
SP: That's a really nice journey. It all makes sense. So you studied architecture, but you never studied art itself?
RN: No, I didn't study art formally. The only art education I received was in high school, focusing on basic foundations like line, color, and technique. I never took it to a tertiary level. However, architecture taught me many things that are adjacent to what you'd learn in art school. The first year of architecture school is quite similar to the first year at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. It's only in the second year that the studies become a bit more niche.
The Night is about possibility, 2023, Resin and organic materials
SP: A lot of artists nowadays are self-taught, it’s always impressive to see. What inspires your work?
RN: My work is about remembering the freedoms I had as a child and hold on to what was revoked by adulthood. Another significant aspect of it is remembering ancestry, trying to figure out who I am because there's a lot of information and a lot of heritage that have been repressed over time due to colonialism. This heritage, which would have been naturally, traditionally passed down from generation to generation, that pipeline, has been clogged because a lot of those stories have been demonized by Western culture. I don't believe in this demonisation or keeping these stories in the dark. I think all the different aspects of myself, my Indian heritage, my African heritage need to be explored. There's a lot of that that has gotten lost in translation.
In that same journey of understanding, I'm bringing up different, wilder Caribbean forgotten narratives. It's exciting to see how everything unfolds. Now, I'm exploring my African and Indian heritage there are things about me that I've always been drawn to, like plants. I love plants, stemming from my childhood spent gardening. I'm discovering their significance in plant magic and medicine, often learning from elders about which one to use for ailments. That's an important aspect in my work, a sub theme which always hold a symbolic meaning: the healing properties of the herbs are tied into the narrative of each work.
Island, Watercolor, Pen & Ink using water from the Rio Grande River, Jamaica and Adom Waterfall, Ghana on Canvas, 79 x 79 inches
For example, I have a piece called Island. It represents a time in my life when I felt stagnant, like I wasn't moving forward. However, with the support of family and friends, and through creating art, I found a way to keep moving. In this piece, I included a plant called ‘White back’ and other herbs used for ailments of the feet, symbolizing movement and healing. Metaphorically, these plants represent how family, friends, and the act of creating art can help me overcome feelings of isolation and stagnation. That’s how I've been approaching it.
There're many different stories that I grew up on hearing, different “ghost stories”, a lot of different folklore you hear from your grandparents, from your older aunties, and it's exciting, but the church revokes their existence. However, it does happen to people, how can it not be true when they have seen it happen. As a child, I was afraid to question these stories, but as an adult, I feel free to explore and ask. This curiosity has led me to discover so much more about the world I occupy, that we occupy. There's so much magic around us, real magic. I'm just happy to tap into that, to be invited into that and allow my work to engaged with this magical world.
SP: How did you come to realise and/or discover this culture, information, and heritage, and was that something that was taught at school or you had to look for it yourself?
RN: It was something that I had to look for myself. The curiosity was always there but it got really unearthed when I did the Reimagine Nanny project in 2022. I had to do research and learn about Nanny of the Maroons, and spoke with elders in the Maroon village. This experience opened up a world of information that isn't talked about. I wanted to use my work to document and archive this information. It wasn't taught in school; I had to research and figure it out on my own.
Moonlight Meditations of Mama Nanny, 2022, Watercolor, Pen & Ink using water from the Rio Grande River on Canvas, 72 x 72 inches
SP: When did you realise all these stories needed to be shared with people?
RN: My work has always been about a wanderer trying to find themselves. Initially, it was a subconscious exploration of my own emotions, represented by animals. Me moving through these larger-than-life emotions was how I was getting around within my own world. The story opened to ancestry, heritage, magic and youth. This competition Reimagine Nanny, which I won, got me thinking deeply about various aspects of my heritage. I didn't know plants have that significance. It started to do something inside of me. Before I could do the piece, I was invited by Leo Douglas, the person in charge of the whole initiative, to visit Portland (Jamaica) to know where Nanny came from. There is something really magical about Portland.
I remember heading down there, and this really slippery, muddy part. I ended up sliding, falling, just covered in mud. My trousers were a mess, so I had to find a stream to wash them off, spending the rest of the day with wet clothes and doing a lot of walking.
It was tough, really tough, but it felt like an initiation. By the end of it, I thought, "Yes, I get it now. I understand a bit more about this world, and I can share something meaningful.". There, I visited the burial place of Queen Nanny herself and collected some water from the river nearby. I thought I should paint with this water. I felt a very spiritual connection with using it to paint, and then that's where that whole idea using living water came from. That was the first time I did watercolour on Canvas, a very large one 6x6foot.
It was in early 2023, I started to do some more work that was tapping into that idea of plants and lost childhood and finding back a childhood. I have a children's book called Ian takes Flight about a little boy who spends time in his godmother's house, like what I used to do, and he finds this magical world of this apple tree, and this giant magical mongoose, a dragon-like creature, gives him a star, flies him around the world.
SP: I was just about to say, You should definitely write children’s book.
Ian Takes Flight, Richard Nattoo
RN: I did it! That book taught me a lot because… They say that life isn't a straight line. My life is like this damn spiral, because I keep on visiting back all things that I did, but now I understand them with more depth. So when I reach that spiral, I saw it in Ian takes flight, I saw my magic world in that book, and how to keep your magic alive. I saw an alternative version to that world, where I felt like I was in a system where my magic was dying. What could I do to keep that alive? That's where all this idea comes from: doing the research to figure out ideas of heritage and culture and folklore and repressed knowledge. A lot of this happened during my time in Ghana. I dived deeper into my research, trying to understand what I was really doing. As an artist, you always have this gut feeling to create, but what's even more interesting is when you research and reflect. You start to notice these cross-references to your childhood, those special moments, and you connect them to your work.
And then you realize, "Oh, this is why I like this—it connects to that part of me." It all starts to make sense. It makes the whole process of creating art so much more fulfilling. You understand you're an individual, yet part of everything at the same time. It's a profound feeling.
So, I guess that's how it all came into play. By the end of 2023 when I came back from Ghana and London, I started a new body of work that went even deeper and the subject matter was a lot less safe because it wasn't figurative anymore.
I came back around the spiral and saw the animals I used to paint. They made a lot more sense to me now. This magical mongoose is in this world too. This peacock, these two roosters, this rabbit—they're all here, in this world. The spirit of them all. I can reimagine these ideas of folklore. I don't need to feel safe anymore by just painting figures. Figures are good, but they alone can't tell my entire story. There was significant development at the end of 2023 that propelled me to where I am now.
Song of the Rooster and the Red Moon, 2024, Watercolour on canvas
SP: You talk a lot about magic, and the way you write it is majic. Would you like to explain why you spell it differently?
RN: When I was younger, I could almost swear that the word magic was spelled M, A, J, I, C. A G didn't make sense to me. It looked like it was spelled wrong. Reconnecting with my inner child, I decided to stick with that spelling. Majic heard all these beautiful stories from these aunties, about magic and folklore. But then Magic went to church and to school and then they said that none of that exists. And now J frowned and became a G. (laugh)
Majic feels purer to me, because my inner child wrote it like that, so I follow through with that.
SP: I've seen on your Instagram that you talk about the magician a lot. Who is he, and what's his role?
RN: The magician represents the inner spirit or inner child. He's at the forefront of everything. The Wanderer is the protagonist, but the magician teaches the Wanderer what to do. The magician helps the Wanderer reconnect with their childlike self and navigate their journey. He explores relationships with characters, like his relationship with the black rabbit, the all-powerful spirit of the Night, guiding the Wanderer closer to being a childlike, teaching the Wanderer how to be young again.
SP: What is majic to you? How would you define it?
RN: Majic is real. It is everything that you didn't realise was there, but always was. It's the ideas you had as a child about the world, when you were closer to a different plane of existence. Majic is witnessing what the spirits do. Majic is also just boiling three plants together and drinking it and feeling better. Majic is these things that you can't really explain and give them space to not be explained. It's about giving space to the unexplainable and allowing it its own existence, opacity. Majic is a right to opacity. Majic is all those that are happening at the same time.
SP: That’s a beautiful definition! What's your process when you create? How do you work?
RN: Sometimes I start with a piece of writing, creating a window into the world I want to explore and for this world to allow me to look in. From there, I sketch to figure out the composition and then start painting. With tapestry pieces, I don't always know what the final product will look like. It allows me to be dynamic and free. With painting, even though everything starts fluidly, as the piece becomes a concrete idea, the lines have to get a bit more defined.
For some tapestry pieces, like the one I'll show you with the magician's face, I do some level of planning to get the colours and tones, and understanding turbulence and composition. I just cut these things out and place them randomly and decide what feels right and glue them together. I like that process sometimes, it's a lot more freeing, because I don't have to worry about whether this line is right. Sometimes I like not knowing and not to define things. It makes it fun. It makes it magic. This thing has a life of its own. It's about giving the work the freedom to evolve and define itself.
The Majician and the Red Moon, Textile, 2024
SP: How would you say your practice change from when you started? or how did your style evolved?
RN: Oh it's changed! Initially, I worked mostly on paper and didn't include backgrounds. As I wanted to tell more stories, I realised how much information, how many stories and folklore you can put in the background. I started incorporating detailed backgrounds, using plants and other elements to deepen the narrative. I later moved from paper to Canvas as I wanted to create bigger works. Painting with watercolor on canvas is uncommon, but it works for me. Most people don’t understand it. My practice has evolved to include larger, more complex pieces, and I now work with various materials to tell my stories.
SP: It's very surprising to use watercolour on canvas.
RN: Yeah, people were trying to get me to go back to paper but I wanted to paint bigger pieces and it's hard to get paper that big. I can figure it out on Canvas, it's about preparing the canvas before you start actually painting that makes the water and canvas really work. I found it's been working for me nicely. So yes my work has changed in that regard. I am now painting on canvas, the backgrounds have gotten a lot moodier, a lot darker, as all of my stories takes place in the night. There isn't really any daytime happening in the work, because in the magic world, there is the Never-ending night.
Previously, when I framed my work, it was on paper, so I had to bring it to a framer. Now, since I work on canvas, I do my own framing. It's evolved over time. This simple, close-framed canvas with natural wood is something I don't think much framers here in Jamaica actually do.
SP: That’s an interesting evolution. You like a challenge!
RN: Yeah. I have conversations with my own work. The materials aren’t obedient and do everything I want them to do. Sometimes they resist, and it's like a dialogue: "Okay, no, I want to do that. I really wish you didn't do that, but let's talk about it."
SP: How did you start using textile?
RN: I started using fabric, because my fiancée Jodeane does fashion. As I saw her working, I realised I really liked it. I started to see how much history and memory is in fabric and I wanted to really tap into that. At the same time, I was looking at prayer mats because I really like the idea of this sacred, rectangular object used to connect to divinity. A lot of what was happening in my work was me trying to connect with that inner child and that inner divinity. I started making pieces inspired by prayer mats—both Hindu and Muslim prayer mats. I experimented with making entire pieces with fabric and even tried painting on fabric. I treated the paint similarly to how I would with watercolour, allowing it to fringe out. When I cut the fabric into pieces, I left the frayed edges as they were, without trying to control them, much like how watercolour behaves. This approach has been working out really well.
Song of the New Moon and the Never Ending Night, 2024
My use of fabric in my practice also comes from inspiration from a visit to PRISM in Miami, where I saw an artist’s work involving painting and embellishing the edges with trimming. I found this intriguing, though I wasn’t sure why. I realized I was drawn to the fringes and edges, reminiscent of the prayer mats I liked. It also reminded me of doilies, or "runners" as we call them in Jamaica, which were always present in my childhood. The fringes, lace, and tassels felt distinctly Caribbean to me. Growing up, I saw them everywhere—on my father's car rearview mirror, on curtains, and in various household items. These elements are embedded in my Caribbean experience and culture.
Visiting Ghana deepened my understanding of my Caribbean identity. Even among other Black people, I noticed cultural differences that made me appreciate the unique blend of African heritage in the Caribbean. This realisation inspired me to incorporate textiles and tapestries into my art.
When I returned to Jamaica, I went to the market to buy fabric, which was an exciting process. This led to the creation of my first piece, Song of the New Moon and the Never Ending Night. I wanted to continue creating pieces using doilies and various fabrics. Trimmings fascinated me; they often stay on shelves for years due to their higher cost and lower demand, making them rare finds once they’re discontinued. There's something special about finding a fabric you love, knowing that once it's gone, you might never find it again. This rarity makes each piece special.
The origin of fabrics adds another layer of interest. I use Kente cloth, knowing it was from Ghana, linking me to my African heritage. However, other fabrics’ origins remain unknown, which resonates with the diverse fabric of Caribbean culture. Just as our languages and customs come from various places, so do our textiles, creating a rich tapestry of influences.
SP: That’s incredible, there is so much symbolism in your work, between the theme, the practice and the material work. It’s impressive. When you told me that it was a watercolour on Canvas, I was very surprised, because I don't think I've ever seen that before. People probably haven’t tried it because they would think it would not work. So I'm guessing it’s hard to paint like that.
RN: Thank you ! It's very different from paper. Paper is Easy
SP: Why didn't you want to use an acrylic or oil paint?
RN: Acrylic and oil paint don't talk back to me, they’re a bit too predictable. They do everything you tell them to do. I don't like that. With watercolour you don't know what it's going to do. Maybe it will warp the paper at some point because there’s a bit more water here and there, but at least it has a life of its own. When I paint, I invite the spirit of a river in the artwork, I want it to pass through a medium that has some character to itself, so these energies can really animate themselves within it. Acrylic feels too stiff for me. I prefer watercolours, I can mix it with the river water.
SP: You use very special tools, it’s not just water but much more than this.
RN: Yeah, I have a shelf of different river water I collected from around the world in my studio. For example, because the Black Rabbit is such an important and powerful spirit in my work, I only paint him with water from a specific source. This water comes from the purest point of the Mayfield River, with no contamination from anyone upstream. It's important to me that this water is pure, as it holds a special significance.
SP: It's fascinating to know the story behind the creation of the work!
Do you feel like you have a role in your community and in which way?
RN: I think I have a very important role in my community. It's crucial for me to inspire others and show them that certain things are possible and have always been possible. Many people have talent, majic, and dreams, but they're afraid to pursue them. I aim to set an example, demonstrating that these things are achievable and that they can do what they love. My role is to inspire and give back, to help whenever someone reaches out. I'm always willing to share information and support others in their journey.
SP : I love that definition; everyone needs an inspiration and example to prove it’s possible to move forward. Especially for the young generation.
What’s next for you ? Any shows coming up ?
RN: Yes! Whispers in the Night, a group show at Eclectica Contemporary with myself, Nedia Were and Akinola Ebenezer. Also I’m doing FNB Joburg with Eclectica Contemporary.
SP: Amazing ! I cant wait to see what you will present for these shows. Thank you for your time and sharing your stories with us !
ALL WORKS AND IMAGES BELONGS TO THE ARTISTS @RICHARD NATTOO