dready art ‘John’s Canoe’ – on custom Orlebar Brown shorts

last year we did a spate of custom made shorts through luxury brand Orlebar Brown who have this very cool in website app for custom ordering shorts with your image on it, super easy … it’s not inexpensive but it is very cool and very custom.

I had just done a piece of a art for a house in jamaica – the art was called ‘John’s Canoe’ – and we put it on a pair of shorts for john …

John Canoe/Junkanoo is a festival, bigger in the Bahamas than most other places I know of, but it  was a big new years day festival in Jamaica when I was a yute … made particularly memorable because of one man who used to get dressed up and stand at a crossroads we used to drive through in country to pass between my grand parents farm and other peoples – and we would stop and give him money …

according to wikipedia “John Canoe was the European name given to an Akan warrior from Axim, Ghana. He was a chief of the Ahanta people in the early 18th century, who established a stronghold in the defunct Fort Fredericksburg and held it against European encroachment for 20 years. It fell finally in 1725 and his followers were transported as slaves to the Americas. He is commemorated in the Junkanoo festival held in the Caribbean each December.”

for me it was just a play on words, because Jamaicans even have a kind of boat that other islanders refer to as the ‘Jamaican Canoe’ – long and narrow, high bowed and with an engine on the back and not a ‘canoe’ at all – and I was drawing a boat …

 
                             dready art ‘John’s Canoe’ – 20×18 – original on paper

coolness …