Lenworth McIntosh, also known as Joonbug, and I connected serendipitously this winter. McIntosh is a Jamaican painter and illustrator based out of Los Angeles, and after finding a piece I’d written on the Jamaica Intuitives—whom David Boxer conceptualized in 1979 as a grouping of Jamaican self-taught artists working through deeply spiritual practices and utilizing discarded and earthbound materials to birth their concepts of life—McIntosh reached out to me on Instagram and we’ve since built a relationship around Jamaica, intuition, and home. Shifting between his current painting practice and a robust illustration practice that has led to collaborations with brands like Baggu, McIntosh applies an intuitive methodology to painting that siphons from his connection to his birthplace—Jamaica—as well as other places he’s lived, including Texas and Los Angeles.
In conversation with McIntosh this April, shortly after the closing of his solo show, The World Around Me and The Worlds Within at Frieze, we spoke about gardening, return, Jamaica, and dusk, arguably the best time of day.
Jordan Barrant: What are you gardening right now?
Lenworth McIntosh: We just found this brand called Rare Seeds and bought a bunch of funky shit. We’ve planted cucumbers, peppers, kale, spinach, and a blackberry tree that’s growing like crazy. We have a nectarine tree that’s getting a bunch of nectarines. And there’s a bunch of other stuff we dropped in there, so we’ll see what happens.
JB: I’m so jealous. All these plants that can thrive in California but not in Chicago!
LM: You might be surprised! With the rare seeds there’s a bunch of hybrids that can thrive in cold climates.
JB: So true! But okay, we can get into it. I’m curious about your booth at Frieze. What were you showing there and what was the inspiration behind it?
LM: The show itself was called The World Around Me and The Worlds Within. And it was this kind of invitation to the home space that I grew up in that shaped me. The previous show was about me finding home, and this show felt like the next chapter of that journey of landing in Jamaica and looking through my younger selves and walking in those shoes.
I think Jamaica has this outward aesthetic of beautiful beaches, a lot of coastline or the town of Kingston through films and things like that. The Jamaica I’m from is more of a mountainous climate and small communities that grow food and take it to market within their own bubble. A lot of families live in the same area and know everyone. It felt more intimate and closer to how I am as a person and the things that I pay attention to. So within the show, there were a lot of landscapes and then there were also people, like my uncle, and other elders that raised me and some things that were internal.
JB: I remember last time we spoke, you mentioned your fairly specific relation to color. You use a lot of fluorescent tones in your works.
LM: The color palettes come from the community I’m from and the land itself. I remember how the land smelled, how it looked after the rain, how things really popped against the ground and the sky or the different types of vegetation that would grow abundantly and the wildlife, like the cattle that was domesticated. All these things went into how I approached the canvas. My favorite time was around dusk. The colors around those times felt really soft and closer to my natural disposition with life.
Having moved through the [United] States and living here [LA], I see a lot of white, bright light in stores. And even going back to Jamaica now, it’s like the tungsten lights are kind of old school and people are just sitting with these bright white lights. It’s cold and feels unnatural to the circadian rhythm of humans.
So it’s trying to remember a time when that [light] worked in tandem with nature. I was keeping all of that in mind when I was choosing the color palettes and remembering times where I’d come home late at night and the light on the veranda would be on and people would be chatting. There are also a lot of paintings that I painted within the house itself. In the bedroom that I was having these deep thoughts and meditations in, there was a Black Christ on the wall, and a Bible on the bed. It was like those two worlds were in the same room, coexisting, and I was figuring out how those worlds work together.
JB: I’m looking at the painting, I came home and there he was (2024), with this depiction of a Black Jesus. Iconography generally is a way of honoring figures you respect and care for deeply. I’m wondering what your relationship to honoring and reverence is through your paintings?
LM: I tended to find more honor outside of the church than I did inside. People that weren’t so gaudy had the best impact on me. The people that were closer to the land had more of my relaxed, welcome approach to things. There’s times where my anxiety is at an all time high and I can look at the garden, and then I feel like the anxiety level’s starting to come down.
And thinking about home, the mountain, inland Jamaica has all of those anxiety-reducing elements within, so you don’t have to do much. So yeah, I think there is something I’m honoring when I’m drawing on that stuff. I would say it’s even higher than the Black Jesus on the wall.
JB: I’m thinking about you saying dusk is your favorite time and about time generally. Capitalism does not invite us to pay attention to the natural cycles of time, whether that be seasons, whether that be the day by day, or paying attention to when you naturally should be winding down.
If the sun is winding down, it’s literally telling you to wind down. So the energy of following the natural lights, following the natural sun, it’s a type of decisiveness that our ancestors were not allowed to have. So I feel like it’s its own kind of religion that is such a stark shift from the Christianity that was placed on Jamaicans, a kind of seasonal and nature based religion.
LM: Yeah, I guess that’s probably why I like it too—the wind down. It’s like a zone before night. Golden hour. The body just wants to relax. I’m thinking of when I was a kid and feeling that time approaching and the smell of dinner. I knew the dogs were probably going to be coming back. I knew the cows were probably going to be walking back and forth, and the birds were kind of softening their noises, certain lights were starting to come on one by one. It was almost like a ritual, like clockwork every day, the same type of rhythm would happen. Maybe I should make a painting about that.
JB: I was gonna ask, do you have a kind of rhythm or ritual in relation to painting?
LM: During the day it’s hard for me to really paint. I’ve had FOMO since I was a kid. If I’m going to be doing some sort of creative thing during the day, it needs to be mixed in with the possibility of discovering something that I’ve never seen before. I need to have a sense of wonder about it. I need to have this curiosity satisfied during the day. At night I don’t really need that. But during the day, I love to be in the midst of all of that hustle and bustle and then come back home and put it into the work.
I would love to have the same approach to painting that I have to illustration. I think I’m striving for that feeling. Painting is very difficult to think of and approach, but illustration is so forgiving because an illustration can be low stakes or it can be high stakes or it can be both at the same time.
JB: Earlier in the conversation we spoke about gardening, and it brought up my own relationships to my plants. There are plants like a snake plant that you can get and it’ll be good forever. I have a monstera that is struggling; like it’s really struggling. Generally if you like gardening or farming you know some plants do not feel natural to tend to, but they feel so much more satisfying when they’re grown or healed than the plants that are easy.
Your painting process seems to have a similar non-linear structure to some of the more complicated plant life, as in needing to tend to the ebbs and flows of it even when it feels unnatural. It also aligns with the kinds of cyclical nature of farmers, like the ones in your hometown, where plants were extremely hard to cultivate but may have looked simple through a childlike gaze. I imagine painting can feel all the more satisfying when complete because of that tending.
As you continue tending to this exploration of home, I’m wondering, what was the beginning of that journey? And where do you see the next chapter taking you?
LM: The beginning came about after my moms passing on April 14, 2023. I had this feeling of rediscovering an identity going back to Jamaica. She’s buried there next to my actual grandmother so there also was this rejoining energy around that. It was like a return home, a calling you know, back to that space, back to that sacred land that is the family land. And you’re on this journey alongside me. And it’s like this quiet internal journey.
It’s not something you’re supposed to just talk among, you know, you’re just like internally quiet. And so it was wild for it to even see people start to whisper the moment they walked into the space and me not having that. And it just felt like, okay, this is a powerful way that I can construct this world, you know, and paint in ways that command the energy that it’s supposed to command and me as the artist, not vocalizing that, just allowing the work to do the vocalizing.
And with The World Around Me and The Worlds Within, it was trying to build a world. I was only able to tell a certain amount in a certain way because at Frieze so many people come in and out rapidly and you don’t really get to sit with it. And so it’s thinking about that, of making more work that is built for people to sit with for a longer period of time, to include elements that allow you to have like a 3D experience with the paintings, to be able to control the lighting, to be able to create the backdrop color story as well as the painting, is what I’m looking forward to, you know, like a more immersive world building. I think it’s my motivation from here on out; how could I make you feel the painting outside of just looking?
JB: As we come to a close. I’m wondering what you feel like your intuition is calling you to do right now, at this moment?
LM: My intuition is calling me to do some sort of doodle. I haven’t done one today. I feel like I just want to meander in the sketchbook for a little while and not have to think about what I’m making. What about you, what’s your intuition calling you to do?
JB: Just sit and do nothing. I think I’m going to sit and do absolutely nothing after this.
Lenworth McIntosh: The World Around Me and The Worlds Within
Frieze Los Angeles
February 2025