Dready
Dready is a character and a style of art created by West Indian (Jamaican born) artist Shane Aquart. ″Dready's bold graphic technique, a style that has become immediately recognizable to viewers of his art″ - National Gallery Cayman Islands The art started out life around a humorous caribbean character called dready, but grew over time to become a style of its own in which the artist himself became known as ″dready″ and was portraying the world around himself rather than just art using the character. ""At some point everything morphed: Dready, and his creator, a Jamaican-born Caymanian with  an advertiser’s instinct for branding and a wicked sense of humor, into Dready himself"." Olivia Leigh Campbell – MACO magazine 2016 History. Dready began as a doodle, in the vein of those in Mad Magazine, around the edges of Shane’s workbooks, but he didn’t begin planning the first Dready designs until the late 1990s. The art itself first began appearing on the scene in late 2004, making its move from doodle to rendered postcard designs and then onto postcards and T shirts in Barbados, Grenada, Cayman and Jamaica in late 2005, and bags and baseball caps in 2006 . Dready, as a business though, wasn't launched until January 2008. The launch of the dready as a business coincided with the beginning of a move, a shift, by the artist from merchandise to dready as contemporary wall art, with his first group show in 2009 and his first permanent gallery placement in 2010. “it was kind of organic, global financial crisis led to a drop in tourism spend and so a fizzle in the T-shirt business at the same time that people began to buy the art as art to hang on their walls” Shane Aquart Dready’s  first solo art show was in 2013 at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in a show called; ‘Things that exist only in my fading memory’ "Dready … has become an instantly recognizable style of art rather than just a character. Colorful, modern, fun, irreverent and cool …" The inclusion into the national collection of the Cayman islands [see The Art of The Cayman Islands, A journey through the national collection by Natalie Urquhart] in 2011 and again in 2013 and 2019, the permanent placement in the Walking Gallery at the Ritz-Carlton in 2011, the first solo shows in Jamaica  in 2014 and again in 2015, the placement throughout the Kimpton Seafire, along with representation with the Chisholm Gallery in Palm Beach in 2016, first group show at the OXO tower in London in 2017, all coupled with a very unique style – “with an incredible use of color and scenery that [I’ve] never been seen before” Patrick McAleenan, Ocean Home Magazine 2018 – all helped to propel dready art from being just a ‘local’ phenomenon into becoming highly collectable and collected all over the world. In 2021 dready became the first artist in Cayman to be asked to do an  NFT linked artwork to auction.