Likkle But Tallawah: Part Two — The Sculpture Was Already There

“Ostinato Rigore”

Stubborn rigour. Relentless precision. — Leonardo da Vinci

“We Likkle But We Tallawah”

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

Michelangelo said that the sculpture already exists inside the stone. The sculptor’s only work is to remove everything that is not the sculpture. It is an idea that sounds like humility but is actually the most demanding statement in the history of art — because it means the artist must see the finished work before a single cut is made. The vision must be total and precise before the tool touches the material.

Stand in front of Devon Garcia’s carved wood portrait of a young woman — her face emerging from warm-toned timber, pink curls flowing, a sunflower at her temple, teal eyes holding something unsaid — and you understand Michelangelo’s claim without needing it explained. This woman was always in the wood. Garcia had the vision to see her and the Ostinato Rigore — the stubborn, relentless precision — to set her free.

Florence’s Sculptors and the War with Resistant Material

The great sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance chose their materials deliberately and suffered for them gladly. Marble resists. Bronze demands mastery of fire and metallurgy. Wood — dense, close-grained, alive with memory — is perhaps the most unforgiving of all. It has a grain, a direction, a preference. Work against it and it splits. Work with it, patiently, in full submission to its nature, and it becomes something that breathes.

Donatello worked wood. So did the workshop masters of northern Europe whose carved altarpieces still hang in churches across Germany and Belgium, the figures inside them so expressive that visitors instinctively lower their voices. What these artists understood — and what Devon Garcia understands — is that wood requires a specific kind of discipline. Not the force of will, but the force of attention. You cannot impose on this material. You must listen to it.

Every mark the chisel makes is permanent. There is no undoing it. This is Ostinato Rigore at its most literal: the relentless precision required to make something this expressive in a material that does not offer second chances.

The Portrait: What the Wood Already Knew

The carved portrait is built on a decision that reveals an artist in full command of his own language. The wood is left in its natural tone — warm, honest, the colour of Jamaican earth — while the curls are painted in vivid pink and the eyes in teal. The organic and the expressive held in the same plane. The wood says: this is where she comes from. The colour says: this is who she is.

“The wood is left in its natural tone. The colour says: this is who she is.”

— On Devon Garcia’s portrait

The sunflower at her temple is deliberate. In the iconography of the Renaissance, flowers carried specific meaning — lilies for purity, roses for love, laurel for glory. Garcia places a sunflower — the flower that turns its face to the light, that follows the sun across the sky — in the hair of a woman whose expression sits at the precise intersection of vulnerability and composure. She is not asking to be looked at. She is simply, completely, present.

This is the quality the great portraitists of Florence pursued above all others: not beauty, exactly, but presence. The sense that the figure in the painting or the sculpture is fully alive, fully there, fully themselves. Botticelli’s women have it. Da Vinci’s subjects have it. Devon Garcia’s carved woman has it. The medium changes. The achievement is identical.

The Breadfruit Relief: Roots, Resistance, and the Jamaican Woman

His second major piece pushes the conversation further. A woman carved in relief, her locs flowing downward into roots, her body merging with the trunk of a breadfruit tree, laden and green above her. Her eyes are closed. Her hands are crossed over her chest. She is not falling. She is not struggling. She is becoming.

The breadfruit arrived in Jamaica in 1793, brought by Captain Bligh, intended as cheap food for enslaved people. It became, over generations, something else entirely — a staple, a comfort, a presence at every Jamaican table. The tree that was imported as an instrument of oppression became an emblem of nourishment and survival. That Garcia chose it as the site of his most profound statement about the Jamaican woman is the kind of cultural intelligence that separates craft from art.

“She is not falling. She is not struggling. She is becoming.”

— On Devon Garcia’s breadfruit relief

The locs that dissolve into roots are the piece’s most devastating detail. Hair as ancestry. Hair as connection to soil. Hair as the visible record of an unbroken line between a woman and the earth she came from. The Renaissance had a tradition of allegory — using the human figure to embody an idea larger than any single person. Botticelli’s Primavera does not just show a woman. It shows Spring itself, Nature itself, the idea of beginning. Devon Garcia’s breadfruit woman does not just show a Jamaican woman. She shows Jamaica itself — rooted, nourishing, overlooked, essential, and growing.

We likkle. But we tallawah. And in Devon Garcia’s hands, the wood says it back.

Own a Piece of Jamaica’s Renaissance

Shop Devon Garcia’s wood sculptures in-store at Devon House, JBDC Corporate and Norman Manley International Airport, or online at thingsjamaicanshopping.com.

From the artisan’s hand to yours.

Next in the series: Part Three — Hopeton Powell and the communication of artistry.

Editorial Team

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