Donald Locke

Donald Cuthbert Locke (17 September 1930 – 6 December 2010) was a Guyanese artist who created drawings, paintings and sculptures in a variety of media.

Donald Locke was born on 17 September 1930 in Stewartville, Demerara County, Guyana.

His father, also called Donald Locke, was a skilled carpenter who made furniture and his mother, Ivy Mae (née Harper), was a primary school teacher.

The family moved to Georgetown in 1938, where Locke attended the Bourda Roman Catholic School and then the Smith's Church Congregational School.

He went on to the Progressive High School, graduating in 1946.

He was accepted as a student at the Broad Street Government School, where he became increasingly interested in drawing.

In 1947 Locke attended a Working People's Art Class (WPAC) taught in Georgetown by the local artist Edward Rupert Burrowes.

This inspired him to take up painting.

Burrowes has often been called the "father of Guyanese art".

In 1950 Locke graduated with a Teacher's Certificate.

Locke became a regular contributor to the annual WPAC exhibitions, and for a while was secretary of WPAC, helping to organise exhibitions in different locations.

In 1952 WPAC gave him the First Prize Gold Medal Award for his abstract painting The Happy Family.

He was given a British Council art scholarship in 1954, the last such scholarship to be awarded in Guyana in this period, with which he was able to study ceramics at the Bath School of Art and Design at Corsham, England.

The Guyana Department of Education provided an additional scholarship that funded his third year at Corsham.

He was taught painting by William Scott and Bryan Wynter, pottery by James Tower and sculpture by Ken Armitage and Bernard Meadows.

He graduated in 1957 with a Teaching Certificate in Art Education.

Returning to Georgetown in 1957, Locke began teaching art at Dolphin Government School and at WPAC.

In 1958 he married Leila Locke (née) Chaplin, a teacher whom he had met at Corsham.

He did not have normal potter's equipment, but was able to make and successfully fire large earthenware pots using an improvised kiln.

In 1959 the Guyanese government gave him a grant to study for a master's degree in fine arts at Edinburgh College of Art, a school in the University of Edinburgh.

There he met the artists Dave Cohen, Sheldon Kaganof and Dion Myers, who introduced the ideas of the California Clay Movement to Britain.

For many years Locke's work reflected their influence.

In 1962 Locke obtained a grant from Edinburgh University to go to Florence and Ravenna, where he undertook historical research

He completed his graduate thesis in 1964 and returned to Georgetown to take up a position as Art Master at Queen's College, where he taught from 1964 until 1970.

He began painting due to lack of facilities for pottery.

Writing about Burrowes in the 1966 Guyana Independence Issue of New World, Locke describes how he was constantly engaged in "technical exploration", including making his own paints from unlikely ingredients and conducting experiments "with balata, buckram, tailor's canvas, rice bags, bitumen, concrete and ... clay mixed with molasses."

In 1969 he obtained a British Council bursary that let him take leave from Queen's College and return to the Edinburgh College of Art for research in ceramic techniques.

In 1970, after a trip to Brazil sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he resigned from Queen's College and moved to London, where he obtained work teaching ceramics.

His work began to incorporate materials such as metal, wood, leather, fur and ceramics.

He divorced Leila in the late 1970s, and obtained permanent residency status in the United States, marrying Art Consultant Brenda Stephenson in 1981.

He gained a growing recognition for his ceramic work, and in 1972 was invited to exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the International Exhibition of Ceramics.

Locke visited the United States for the first time in 1976, as guest artist at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Montville, Maine.

He studied in the United Kingdom, and worked in Guyana and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in 1979.

He spent his last twenty years, perhaps the most productive and innovative period of his life, in Atlanta, Georgia.

His eldest son is British sculptor Hew Locke.

His first of many bronze sculptures were cast by the Arizona Bronze Foundry in 1980.

In 1983 he moved to Phoenix, Arizona.

Locke lived in the southwest of the United States for 11 years.

During this period he was the Arizona correspondent for Artspace magazine,

In 1999 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture, and for a year was an artist in residence at Arizona State University.