Born in 1914 on Church Street in South Sound, Miss Lassie was a nurse and shopkeeper for most of her life. It wasn’t until the age of 62 that she picked up a paintbrush for the first time. Driven by what she described as a spiritual vision, her first painting was a bird flying across a windowpane on her own house.
“My friends and my sister didn’t like it,” she recalled with a chuckle. “One of them even said, ‘You see those windows? Why didn’t her sister stop her from messing them up?” But no one could stop her. That little bird was only the beginning.
Over the next few decades, she painted more than 250 works. She painted on canvas, on furniture, on fridges, and across the walls and ceilings of her 170-year-old family home. Her home, now known as Mind’s Eye, is a nineteenth-century traditional wattle-and-daub house built by Miss Lassie’s father and grandfather. It sits on a site with a long history of Caymanian shipbuilding. That legacy lives on through the scenes she painted.
Miss Lassie didn’t wait for approval, training, or permission to begin her work. “I paint things as I see it. If it is wrong or right,” she said. Every image came to her as a vision. If it didn’t come that way, she simply couldn’t paint it despite trying many times.
What she saw was deeply rooted in her faith and her Caymanian heritage. Her paintings are filled with vivid Christian themes, including God comforting Cayman fishermen caught at sea, the angel of the Lord proclaiming Christ’s birth to Mary, and scenes of South Sounders preparing for Christmas.
Her paintings tell the unique story of Cayman. Many of the memories she paints are deeply personal and express times when her own brother was lost at sea or the launch of the South Sound ship, Klosking, that carries her name.
Miss Lassie describes her art as capturing a time when “… the buggy and the horse was a treasure, and a bicycle was rare to the eye. Everywhere we went, we had to walk in sand up to our ankles deep. But the length of miles did not distress us for our fellowship then was sweet. Who kept our island up in those hard days of toil? It was our sailor men.”
Marcia Muttoo of the Cayman National Cultural Foundation put it best in an interview with the Cayman Compass, “Miss Lassie was an elemental artist. She was driven to do her art whether she had resources or whether other people thought it was good or not. Nothing was going to stop her from doing it.”
And maybe that’s what makes her work feel so alive even today. It’s not just the bold colors or the powerful imagery. It’s her conviction. Her story reminds us that you don’t need formal training to be creative. You don’t need everyone to like what you do. And it’s never too late to start.
Miss Lassie passed away in 2003 at the age of 89, but her home remains a cultural and spiritual beacon. It’s a place where Cayman’s history, Christianity, and creativity all come together.
Whether her visions were from God or not, we’ll never really know. Historical accounts from friends recall her as a lively child who chased others down the beach shouting colorful insults. Others recall her being a bit odd and viewed her home as chaotic rather than seeing it as the beautiful work of art that it’s know to be today. Aware of the sentiments, Miss Lassie was known to laugh in response saying, “my doctor knows that I’m perfectly sane, and it doesn’t matter what people think anyway.”
She just painted what she saw. And thank goodness she did.
Direct quotes from Miss Lassie are taken from video footage published by the Cayman Islands National Cultural Foundation.
