Exhibition
A fourth-generation Caymanian, Gladwyn K. “Miss Lassie” Bush began painting at the age of 62 after having a visionary experience, as she described it. Strong Christian themes run through her work which she painted not only on canvas, but also on walls, windows, and furnishings of her home. A purely self-taught artist, Miss Lassie’s work is deceptively simple, illustrating not artifice but creative truth distilled to its simplest form — seeking perhaps a return to the innocence and freedom of childhood.
The great body of Miss Lassie’s work, from which 25 paintings had been extracted for this exhibition, tells the story of her own life mirrored in the life of Jesus Christ: a life of pain and suffering, misunderstanding, humiliation, but also of immense joy, faith, prayer, generosity, and forgiveness. All together the works on display represented a remarkable cultural and artistic gift of identity to the people of the Cayman Islands.
About the Artist
Gladwyn K. “Miss Lassie” Bush
1914–2003
A fourth-generation Caymanian, Gladwyn K. “Miss Lassie” Bush was a self-taught artist who began painting at the age of 62 following a visionary experience. Her work, which she referred to as her “markings”, is executed in a naïve style reflecting her status as an intuitive, self-taught artist. Strong Christian themes run through her art, which she not only painted on canvas, but also on the walls, windows, and furnishings of her home. Miss Lassie’s work was included in the 1995 Carib Art international traveling exhibition and is profiled in several books on intuitive art worldwide, including Raw Creation (Phaidon Press, 1996), Caribbean Art (Thames & Hudson, 1998), Fantasy Worlds (Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1999), and My Markings: The Art of Gladwyn K. Bush (CNCF, 1994). Her work is in private and public collections, most notably that of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. In her lifetime, the artist was honoured as a Member of the British Empire (MBE) in 1997 and received a CNCF Heritage Award in 1993 as well as the Excellence Award in 1999. Her home, in Grand Cayman, was added to the World Heritage Watch List in 2012. NGCI exhibitions include a solo show Prayer Canvases in 2012, Mediating Self (2017), and Tropical Visions (2019).
