I cannot remember the exact moment I met the artist Donald Locke (born 1930, Guyana, South America, died 2010, Atlanta, GA). I only know we recognized each other, not from the past but as kindred artistic spirits. I did not know this at the time, but Donald’s work was about to change from bronze figures and large dark paintings to talismanic sculptures and their counterpart in drawings. This must have been here in Atlanta, sometime around 1990. A short time later, Donald wrote about an exhibition of mine at a gallery in town, and I was struck by how insightful his review was. 

For those who knew him, Donald liked to talk and hold court about art with just the right amount of Caribbean twang to make his proclamations charming. He could explain it all. He embraced the folk art he saw here in Atlanta and realized that this was a territory he could explore as an African Caribbean artist. I remember him telling me as I was about to do an installation in Italy that in Italy they understand and appreciate what it means to be an artist, and that I should revel in it. I did. And so did he, with his generosity of character and his wonderful dinners for ten or twelve for which he did all the cooking. At the table, he explained the methods behind his personal systems whether of shopping for the dinner, spicing the food, finding the right piece of wood for a sculpture, or writing about another artist’s work.