Llewellyn Xavier

b. 1945, Saint Lucia

At the age of seventeen, Llewellyn Xavier left Saint Lucia for Barbados, where he was first introduced to watercolors while working as an agricultural apprentice. In 1968, Xavier traveled to England and became a pioneer in the field of mail art. He moved to the United States in 1979 to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Later, he joined a monastery in Montreal to become a Cistercian monk for some time before leaving the monastery, marrying, and returning to Saint Lucia in 1987.

Xavier created perhaps his most important works in 1993, titled Global Council for Restoration of the Earth’s Environment. This series of large collages, first shown at the Patrick Cramer Gallery in Geneva, incorporates a variety of recycled materials, including naturalist prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and postage stamps from many countries. The series also features signatures of various world leaders in environmentalism and a number of conservationists.

Xavier is well known for his oil paintings, characterized by multicolored drops of paint applied to the canvas using a series of special tools. Looking at his paintings, it is clear that Xavier draws inspiration from the Caribbean, his homeland, in his use of color and light. His work often reflects his love for the environment. Xavier describes his latest exhibition as “the result of fifty years of observing the behavior of paint, the juxtaposition of colors in close proximity to one another, creating texture and attempting to understand the paradox of form.”

In 2004, Llewellyn Xavier was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, among others.