Jeffery Perry
The Man Behind the Lines: A Journey Back to the Pencil
The Chalkboard Prophet
The smell of chalk dust and the sound of a heavy wooden ruler hitting a desk—those are the sounds of my beginning. I can still see the green chalkboard at Old Harbour Primary, wiped clean and waiting. Back then, I wasn’t just Jeffery Perry; I was the boy the teachers called upon when the seasons changed. When Christmas came around, I was the one tasked with bringing the festivities to life in white and colored chalk. I’d stand there, small for my age, sketching poinsettias and bells while the other children ignored their lessons to watch my hand move. There is a specific kind of silence that happens when people watch a person draw. It’s a heavy, respectful quiet. I felt it then, and in many ways, I’ve been chasing that quiet ever since.
The Long Detour
But life has a way of pulling you away from your gifts. After high school, the pencils stayed in the drawer. I wandered far from that chalkboard, and eventually, life took a turn that landed me locked up overseas. It was a time of darkness that stripped everything away until there was nothing left but the person I was before the world got its hands on me. In that isolation, I found my way back to the paper. It was a reckoning. When I finally came back home to Jamaica, I wasn’t an artist yet—not to the world. I linked up with a friend and started doing construction, spending my days tiling floors and mixing mortar. My hands became calloused, the fine motor skills of an artist buried under the grit of a job site. I thought art was something I’d left behind in childhood, a hobby I’d outgrown while trying to survive.
The Resurrection of a Gift
I was well into my late twenties before the pencil truly reclaimed me. Something miraculous happened during those years while incarcerated. When I finally picked the pencil back up, without a single day of practice in years, I was drawing better than I ever had in my life. The lines were surer; the eyes I drew had more depth. It was a sign from the Creator that this path was still open, waiting for me to be brave enough to walk it, even if I was starting later than most.
I remember the day I decided to take the leap. I was working a tiling gig in Montego Bay, looking at the sprawling resorts and the sea of tourists flowing through them like a tide. I saw them carrying cameras and souvenirs, and I thought, I can give them something a camera can’t. I can give them a piece of themselves through my eyes. I walked into the Franklin D Resort in Runaway Bay with nothing but a few samples and a pounding heart. They didn’t just like the work; they invited me to stay. For two years, I was their Resident Artist. I moved on to Sunset Beach and the legendary Half Moon, spending my days capturing the faces of families, the wag of a favorite pet’s tail, and the soft features of a child on vacation.
Confronting the Disbelievers
It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of disbelief back then. People in Jamaica are practical; they see a man with a trade like tiling and they see a living. They see a man with a pencil and they see a dreamer. “You really think you can make a living doing this?” they’d ask. Their doubt became my fuel. I decided to be so dedicated to the craft that they couldn’t help but see it as a profession.
The hardest part wasn’t the drawing—it was the distance. For years, I was a nomad, traveling the long, winding road from my home in Old Harbour to the North Coast, chasing the tourist dollar. It was hectic, and it was draining. I realized that if I wanted to be a brand and not just a worker, I had to build a base at home. I wanted my own people to value my work as much as the visitors did. I started setting up at local events, and eventually, I found myself in Emancipation Park in Kingston. Under the shade of the trees, the crowds would gather just like they did in primary school. Jamaicans from all walks of life would stand in a circle, watching me turn a blank sheet of paper into a person. It confirmed what I felt: my work wasn’t just for the hotels. It was for us.
Finding My Way Home
Then came my introduction to the Things Jamaican family. I say family because that is truly what they became. They saw the value in a hand-drawn portrait as a piece of our national heritage. They pushed me into spaces I never thought I’d be—airports, major expos, and galleries. They weren’t just selling my sketches; they were highlighting my talent as something uniquely Jamaican. They became the engine behind my career when I was still trying to find the gears. Because of them, my work isn’t just sitting in a frame in a house in New York or London; it’s recognized here, on the soil that inspired it.
When I sit down to work now, I free my mind. I have to. You can’t capture a soul if your own head is cluttered with the stress of the day. I budget my time, person by person, line by line. It can get hectic, and sometimes I find myself wishing for a bit more free time, but then I remember the construction sites and the silence of the years I lost, and I am nothing but grateful that my “job” is to look at people and find the beauty in them.
A Legacy in Graphite
If you are a member of the Diaspora and you’ve been away from home for a decade, and you hold one of my sketches in your hand, I want you to feel a sense of stillness. I want you to feel that a special moment has been captured in time—not through a digital lens, but through the hand of a man from Old Harbour who took the long way back to his gift.
In five years, I want to go beyond the sketch. I want to paint the scenes of rural Jamaica that live in my head—the old houses, the way the light hits the hills in the morning, the images that make you smell the rain on the hot asphalt the moment you look at them. To any young person sitting on a dream, afraid to start because it doesn’t look like a “real” career: go for what moves you. If it is your gift, it would be a shame to let it pass you by. It almost happened to me. I almost let Jeffery the artist stay buried under bags of thin-set and grout. But the gift is patient. It will wait for you to be ready. Just make sure that when you finally pick up that pencil, you don’t ever put it down again.
