Leila Locke

Leila Elizabeth Locke (née Chaplin, 1936–1992) was a Guyanese artist. Born in England, she lived in Georgetown, Guyana from 1958 until her death, taking out Guyanese citizenship in the early 1970s.

Leila Chaplin was born on 27 April 1936 in London, and was raised in Dartington, Devon. In 1957 she obtained a Diploma in Art Education from Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, specialising in painting, sculpture and pottery. She often returned to teaching in various schools in the UK and Guyana thereafter. At Corsham she had met sculptor Donald Locke. She travelled to Guyana to marry him in 1958. In 1959 she and Donald moved to Edinburgh, whilst he studied at Edinburgh School of Art for four years. She had three children, Hew Locke b. 1959, Jonathan Locke b. 1962 and Corrine Locke b. 1964 with Donald Locke. They divorced in the late 1970s. She died on 11 April 1992 in a hospital on Barbados.

Artist and anthropologist Denis Williams described Leila Locke as being amongst those artists that created a vision of Guyana: "They laid the foundation to what I have called critically the Guyana School of Art which constituted a body of artists struggling to find a form of art out of the given circumstances of their environment. Leila Locke contributed to that movement in that she brought her English outlook to bear on our intimate backyards, our houses, our jalousies. She was intrigued by the geography of our landscape and gave us a brilliant view of ourselves through our work."

Locke cited Bonnard, Gauguin and Piero della Francesca as strong influences in her work. In the mid 1960s she produced paintings that is now referred to as her 'Kitty phase', after the Kitty district in which she lived. For some of these she would approach strangers and ask to paint their backyards. She recorded the varying activities and sights of local life.

Elfrieda Bissember (later Director of Castellani House, Guyana, Guyana's National Art Gallery) has written of her paintings "It is a record of a contemplative moment, complete in it's details of unassuming but essential elements of any Guyanese life...There is a delicacy and unity of colour in the artist's handling of paint, and she has created a scene of great simplicity, warmth and directness...harmoniously designed in it's unassuming details within this framed glimpse of a local backyard...thoughtful and limpid". From the mid 1970s she produced paintings that were a complete departure from her earlier work: non-representational, bright, abstract patterns and motifs, one of which was a strong recurring motif of a stylised Amerindian man with sun-ray markings around the head.

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