Biography

The Intuitive painter Leonard Daley was born in Point Hill, St. Catherine, in 1930. He started painting some time in the 1960s but no works have been preserved from before 1979, when he first came to the attention of the local artistic community. He came to national prominence in 1987, when his work was featured in the National Gallery’s Fifteen Intuitives exhibition. While his visionary, spontaneously abstract expressionist work was well received by aficionados of outsider art and Intuitive art, it proved controversial with those in the Jamaican art world who had more mainstream, academic tastes and could not appreciate his work as “art.” Despite this mixed response, Daley’s work was widely exhibited and collected, in Jamaica and abroad and ultimately received significant critical acclaim. It was included in several other National Gallery exhibitions, such as Intuitives III (2007) and is represented in its permanent collection. Daley’s work was also included in several noteworthy overseas exhibitions, such as New World Imagery (1995), an exhibition of contemporary Jamaican art which toured in the U.K., Caribe Insular (1996), a Caribbean exhibition which toured in Spain and Germany, and Redemption Songs (1997), an exhibition of Jamaican Intuitive art which was shown in the USA. Daley lived in the Liguanea area of Kingston when his work was first discovered in 1979, and subsequently moved to the rural community of Fidler Hill in St. Catherine, where his self-built house was a work of art in its own right with all surfaced covered with his paintings and sculptures. In the latter years of his life, he lived in the Jack’s Hill area of Kingston. He died in 2006.