By: Staff Writer
February 11, 2022
A Jamaican living in Canada is all about the children with his artwork as he brings an upcoming Caribbean children’s book to life.
Wayne Carnegie, illustrator and animation artist, told Caribbean Magazine Plus about his partnership with another Jamaican living in Canada, Jodi-Ann Francis, on their up-coming book “Denver and the Mango tree” that’s coming out at the end of this April where he wants to show the next generation what it was like growing up in the Caribbean.
Mr Carnegie is the illustrator of the book and told us firstly how he got into art-work and book illustration for Children’s books: “I’m new to it. This project that I’m working on right now that you see a posted is a collaborative piece between me and another Caribbean writer from Jamaica, this is a partnership that we kind of developed. She’s a writer and I’m the artists kind of thing and we are working towards putting this story out by April of this year.”
The book is about a Caribbean boy named Denver who has big dreams beyond his country, “The book is called Denver and the Mango tree and if you grew up in the Caribbean a lot of us know about finding the mango tree because we are always up in trees when we were younger,” he said.
Mr Carnegie is a self-proclaimed farm boy from Jamaica who left Jamaica for Canada in 2003 to begin working as an animator and illustrator. He currently works for Mainframe Studios in Canada and also still finds time to be a part-time virtual lecturer for the Edna Manley College in Jamaica where he also teaches digital art and animation.
Mr Carnegie added: “I’ve been here [Canada] since 2003. Since I finished high school and finished CXC and I didn’t even bother to do the A-levels, I just came right to Canada and I went to I study animation at the Toronto Film School and It took off from there and I’ve been here ever since.”
Working full time for Mr Carnegie is taking a toll along with all of his other endeavours, but Mr Carnegie does have planned to work on one more book before the end of this year and the second one will be his own book where he will be the author and the illustrator, but he did not go into any details about what the book will be or when it will be ready. “We’re trying out this book and I work in animation full time. So, I’m looking to do like two books for a year. Just trying to insert those in my busy schedule and it’s basically geared towards Caribbean style stories,” he said.
Denver and the Mango tree will be made available for the wider Caribbean as well as anything else Mr Carnegie puts his hands to because he believes the generation coming up now need to appreciate what life was like on the island before all of the internet and video games had them stuck in the house. “I grew up in the 80s where we climbed trees and went outside a lot. The younger generation is missing that and I want to share what it was like to them.
He continued, “A lot of these kids that are from Caribbean parents in the diaspora. They don’t know how we grew up in the Caribbean. Some of these parents grow their kids and they don’t know anything about Jamaica they don’t know anything about Trinidad. They don’t know anything about their history.
“Maybe they come they go to a resort that said they go back home, but they don’t know like how their parents used to play. Those little intricate things like playing marbles because we used to play a lot of marbles in the Caribbean, we used to jump rope and stuff like that. As I said, I grew up in a rural area so I used to go feed the goats and chase the chicken in the coop at night time and. Just simple life lessons that we want to impart and this is what your mom and dad used to do in the Caribbean and this is where it grew up.”