Bariffe was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica in 1970. He is a graduate of Wolmer’s Boys’ School, Mico Teacher’s College, Edna Manley College of the Visual Arts and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Bariffe writes, “My first experiences with the Arts started with my mother. She was a dressmaker living in Kingston. I used to see her drawing her designs to make clothing for the lady she was working for. On my way home from school I would stop to wait until five o’clock to go home with her while I watched her work. The drawings in the magazines I saw her drawing from, I thought, were fascinating and thus began my attempts at trying to draw.

I later on at the age of nine years old was sent to live with my aunt who was a school teacher in another parish. Although at the time I did not like the feeling of being separated from my mother, I quickly after being in the home of a teacher for some years, was influenced to make teaching a passion of mine as well. I attended the school my aunt taught at and frequently would go to her classroom to wait and watch until school ended so we could leave to go home.

Both teaching and painting are parts of the self I find very comfortable expressing myself through. I spent three years at Mico Teacher’s College at the direction of my then tutor Burchell Duhaney pursuing a course in Art and Craft. At the end I felt I did not know enough about the act of painting that I enrolled in the School of Art in Kingston, Jamaica. There I was engaged by very capable tutors about how to translate ideas into pictures.

Somewhere in the middle of my third year at the art school I felt that my art was a repetition of all that had come before. It was a demonstration of well intended Art instruction. I began experimenting in my third year of art school with different materials that could take the place of traditional pigments. That act was born out of the necessity. Art materials are very expensive and one cannot afford to spoil canvases or paints. I began using cheaper readily available surfaces and pigments such as engine oils and burlaps. They were less expensive than traditional oils and acrylics. By my fourth year I had developed a repertoire of materials that seemed to be producing something interesting.

In my fourth year at the School of Art,Cecil Cooper, Hope ‘Sweetie’ Wheeler, and Bryan McFarlane thought somewhat of it that they secured a scholarship for me to attend the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth to further continue my experiments in an MFA program. At the end of the degree I had produced over 200 works using these alternative materials. The works had become about the process steeped in iconography. Iconography for me is a language that both grew out of the manipulation of the materials and subconscious thought described in many of my dreams. The images are about marrying thought and process. I work with allowing the process to take center stage and then inserting into the surfaces a semblance order, thought and meaning. They are always about the process, then thought, until some new force or concern drives me to make images with a new purpose in mind. I have the need to make known my ideas and I simply have to find a way to make the illusion into image”.