ONE LOVE: Paintings and Sculptures by Errol Lloyd

‘One Love’ brings together works spanning several decades, revealing an artist continually attentive to the dignity, vitality and complexity of Black experience. About Errol Lloyd’s work is shaped by an enduring concern with people: how they inhabit communities, how they carry culture, and how individual lives become part of a larger social history. Born in Lucea, Jamaica in 1943 and based in Britain since 1963, Lloyd has worked across painting, sculpture, illustration and literature. As an active member of the Caribbean Artists Movement between 1966 and 1972, he occupies an important position within the development of Black British art, while maintaining a practice that has always remained distinctively personal. ‘One Love’ brings together works spanning several decades, revealing an artist continually attentive to the dignity, vitality and complexity of Black experience. In the early paintings, the human figure is both intimate and monumental. Works such as Body Beautiful (1972), Mother & Child (1972), Hands (1972) and the exhibition’s title work, One Love (1970–72), show Lloyd exploring the body as a site of tenderness, strength and psychological presence. His figures are frequently held within bold, compressed compositions, where pattern and colour operate not as decoration but as a visual language of identity and belonging. Portraiture has remained central to Lloyd’s practice. His painted sitters possess a quiet self-possession, while his sculpture brings the same attentiveness into three dimensions. Lloyd began making commissioned bronze portraits during his early years in Britain, depicting significant cultural and political figures including C. L. R. James, John La Rose and Linton Kwesi Johnson. His bust of La Rose was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004, reflecting a sustained commitment to recording those who have shaped Black intellectual and cultural life. Alongside portraiture runs another major current: collective life. The Domino Players (1986) transforms an everyday social ritual into a scene of fellowship and concentration, while Lloyd’s extensive engagement with Notting Hill Carnival captures a community in motion. Across paintings and works on paper from the 1980s to the 2010s, carnival appears not simply as spectacle but as a living cultural space—of preparation, performance, music, costume, memory and encounter. There is warmth throughout Lloyd’s work, but never sentimentality. His paintings are constructed through close observation and a profound sense of participation. He records both private and public worlds, allowing portraiture, family, friendship, music and celebration to coexist within a broader history of Black Britain. The title ‘One Love’ therefore feels especially apt. It suggests not uniformity, but connection: between Jamaica and Britain, individual and community, memory and present experience. Across more than half a century, Lloyd’s art has remained committed to representation as an act of recognition; making visible the people, relationships and cultural worlds through which history is lived. Cameron Amiri Director --- About Errol Lloyd Errol Lloyd is a Jamaican-born British artist, writer, and illustrator working across painting, sculpture, and literature. He was educated at Munro College, Jamaica, where he excelled academically and in sport, representing the school in athletics, hockey, gymnastics, football, and debating, serving as Head Boy and gaining distinctions in all A-Level art examinations. A formative influence was visiting the studio of African American sculptor Richmond Barthé, who settled in Jamaica in 1948. Lloyd moved to the UK in 1963 to study law at the Council of Legal Education, during which he produced commissioned bronze portrait busts of figures including C. L. R. James, Sir Garfield Sobers, Richard Small, Lord Pitt, John La Rose, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. His bust of John La Rose was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (2004), and his painted portrait of Kamau Brathwaite, commissioned by Pembroke College, Cambridge (2019), is on permanent display in its dining hall. He was active in the Caribbean Artists Movement (1966–1972), a key force in Black British art, later designing book covers for Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, New Beacon Books, and Pearson Longman, and teaching Advanced Painting at Camden Arts Centre (1975–1976). As an illustrator, his first mainstream picture book (The Bodley Head) was Highly Commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal (1973). His novel Many Rivers to Cross (Random House, 1995) was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. His children’s books are widely used in the UK national curriculum and published internationally. His non-fiction Celebrating Black History (Oxford University Press, 2027) includes figures such as Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Marcus Garvey, C. L. R. James, and Una Marson. His plays have been staged by Carib Theatre, Tricycle Theatre, and Oxford Playhouse (from 1988), his poetry appears in anthologies, and he was one of 24 illustrators in Artists of the Page (McFarland & Co., 1992). Lloyd has exhibited widely, including No Colour Bar at Guildhall Art Gallery (2018); The Lie of the Land at Milton Keynes Gallery (2019), where his painting The Notting Hill Carnival was shown alongside Bridget Riley, J. M. W. Turner, Henry Moore, and Thomas Gainsborough; and Get Up Stand Up Now at Somerset House (2019). In 2022–2023, he co-curated an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard with Paul Dash and John Lyons, with the Fitzwilliam Museum, showing work alongside Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pablo Picasso, and Graham Sutherland; his work was acquired by Kettle’s Yard and the NHS Imperial Health Charity Art Collection. Recent exhibitions include 198 Gallery (2022–2023) and Paul Stolper Gallery (2023). The Domino Players was featured in The Guardian, and The Drummer – The Lion of Judah Roars in His Head was shown at Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music at the British Library (2024). His work has also appeared at the Whitworth Art Gallery (2022–2023) and Hepworth Wakefield (2023). In 2025, editions of The Drummer and The Lesson were published, and Nini at Carnival was reissued by Thames & Hudson. His writing has appeared in The New Beacon Review, Artrage, Moving Worlds, and publications by the British Library and Tate. Honours include an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Newcastle University (2022) and Honorary Membership of the Youth Libraries Group (2025). He has made several hundred visits to UK schools and libraries and has served as a governor of Malorees Primary School and board member of the Tricycle Theatre and Future Histories for over twenty years. Read more Toggle Sculpture Painting