Likkle But Tallawah: Part Three — The Painting Already Knows You

“Ostinato Rigore”

Stubborn rigour. Relentless precision. — Leonardo da Vinci

“We Likkle But We Tallawah”

We are small, but we are mighty. — Jamaican proverb

The great patrons of the Florentine Renaissance did not simply buy paintings. They experienced a recognition. Standing before a Botticelli, a Ghirlandaio, a della Francesca, they felt that the painting had been made specifically for them — that something in the work knew something about them that they had not yet put into words. This is what separated the masters from the craftsmen. The craftsmen made beautiful objects. The masters made mirrors.

Hopeton Powell calls himself “a likkle mawga man.” Then his paintings walk into the room, and the room changes. The colours do not suggest. They insist. The compositions do not ask to be noticed. They arrive. And somewhere in the gallery or the shop or the living room where one of his pieces hangs, a person stops, and feels the thing Powell calls “the communication of artistry” — the moment a painting recognises you back.

Botticelli’s Mirror and Powell’s Puzzle

Hopeton Powell describes his art as a puzzle — freeing, but filled with dimension, because what someone sees at first glance is not what they see as time goes on. This layering of meaning, this slow reveal, is not accidental. It is the whole point. The Florentine masters understood this deeply. They painted in layers, physically and conceptually. The underpainting said one thing. The glaze over it said another. The final varnish unified them into something that changed depending on the light and the angle and the mood of the person standing in front of it.

Powell works in the same tradition without ever having studied it directly. This is what it means to be a natural painter — to arrive at truths about the medium that others reached only through centuries of accumulated doctrine. He is self-taught and self-proclaimed “AfricanJamaican,” and both of those facts are essential to understanding his work. He didn’t inherit a tradition. He built one.

The Gift He Couldn’t Stop Giving Away

Powell found his gift young. As a child in Ocho Rios, whatever he drew or painted he would give away to friends, not yet understanding that the love people had for his work was already the market speaking. The talent was visible to everyone except, perhaps, in the way that mattered most commercially, to himself.

“Me’s just a likkle mawga man.”

— Hopeton Powell

The shift came later. He began to see that art could be both a calling and a livelihood — that making something beautiful and making a life were not in conflict but were in fact the same act, performed with the same hands. This is the insight that separated the Renaissance artisan from the Renaissance artist. The artisan made what was ordered. The artist made what was true, and then found the person for whom it was true.

Powell does both. He works across the full spectrum — abstract pieces, custom artwork, portraiture, landscapes — and has developed a philosophy about what makes art land with a buyer that is, at its core, a Renaissance idea about the relationship between maker and audience.

The Communication of Artistry

He calls it the communication of artistry. True art, he says, appeals to each customer’s nature when they walk away with a purchase. His best analogy for this is direct and Jamaican in its precision:

“When yuh see something you like and is like yow mi nah lef’ dis — is something mi a look fa from long time.”

— Hopeton Powell

This is Botticelli’s mirror described in a Jamaican voice. The recognition. The sense that the work was already yours before you found it. Powell also makes pieces inspired by what his customers love, not only what he loves. This is not compromise. It is the same collaborative intelligence that drove Florentine patronage — the understanding that the greatest art exists in the space between what the artist sees and what the audience needs to feel. Lorenzo de’ Medici didn’t just collect art. He shaped it, directed it, brought his own vision into dialogue with the artist’s. Powell’s customers do the same, and he honours that.

The Renaissance Nobody Saw Coming

This is the third and final part of the Likkle But Tallawah series, but it is not a conclusion. It is an arrival.

Florence’s Renaissance was recognised as a Renaissance only in retrospect. The painters, sculptors and ceramicists living through it — the ones doing Ostinato Rigore in their studios at dawn, grinding pigment, firing kilns, working resistant stone and wood into something that breathed — did not know they were in a historic moment. They were just doing the work. Showing up. Refusing to produce anything less than what the work demanded.

Leonia Mckoy is at the wheel at 3 a.m., turning Jamaican earth and ash and slurry into something a Jamaican woman in London will hold and feel home. Devon Garcia is standing before a plank of dense, unforgiving wood, finding a woman inside it who carries a breadfruit tree in her hair and roots where her locs should be. Hopeton Powell is painting the thing you didn’t know you’d been looking for, from a studio in Ocho Rios, with the particular confidence of a man who has never mistaken his size for his ceiling.

They are not waiting for the world to validate them. They are in the workshop. They are at the wheel. They are holding the chisel. They are mixing the pigment. They are doing, with the discipline of da Vinci and the defiance of a proverb that has outlasted every empire that tried to silence it, exactly what the great artists of Florence did.

We likkle. But we tallawah. And the work proves it every time.

Own a Piece of Jamaica’s Renaissance

Shop the work of Hopeton Powell, Leonia Mckoy and Devon Garcia in-store at Devon House, JBDC Corporate and Norman Manley International Airport, or explore the full Art to Heart collection at thingsjamaicanshopping.com.

From the artisan’s hand to yours.

The Likkle But Tallawah series is complete. Thank you for reading.

Editorial Team

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