SARAH BECKETT’S Latest exhibition, Iere, was different from her usual offerings.
Hosted at Tapas restaurant at the Hotel Normandie, St Ann’s, from July 9-13, the 23 works were varied in theme, style and media.
All except one were done within the last year in pencil, pen, gouache, oils, acrylics and gold leaf on paper and canvas. And while some pieces were in her recognisable dreamy and mysterious style, they all had a romantic feel to them.
They included portraits, flora, hummingbirds and figures, including pan players.
“I wanted to find my own way to do it (pan), because it is a subject matter that drives a lot of Trinidadian art, logically, because it's integral to our lives. And I wanted to find a way that I felt was genuinely my vision and not influenced by other people. So it's taken me a while to formulate a way that I wanted to do it,” told WMN.
In addition, Beckett said she usually had an overall theme around which the work wove, but this exhibition grew out of a collection of poetry that reflected her journey. So a lot of the paintings were new, but some were developments of paintings she did in previous series.
Beckett had been writing poetry for the past 30 or 40 years and her work had been printed in several publications in Australia, TT and the UK.
[caption id="attachment_1096122" align="alignnone" width="989"] Sarah Beckett's In The Blue Incense of Evening. - Photo by Faith Ayoung[/caption]
But on July 8 at her exhibition opening at Tapas, she launched the first collection of her work, Iere: Living in the Land of the Humming Bird, which was interspersed with photographs of some of her art over the years.
“In my own life I’ve always been very shy about my poetry. It took me a long time to dare to speak it out loud. Actually, Joan Dayal, owner of Paper Based Bookshop, was the first person to ask me to read in public, so I have a lot to thank her for.
“So I sort of had the poetry on one side, which was under the radar, and obviously I’ve been painting all my life. I’m not quite sure how it happened but gradually I began to see, ‘Hang on, these are different expressions of a similar idea. The poems are verbal paintings. And the paintings are silent poems.’”
Beckett spoke to WMN at Tapas restaurant on July 10 surrounded by her work.
She said the author’s notes of the book best expressed what drove her work. It said Trinidad cradled her as both a poet and an artist. It was where she found her voice and the book was her love song to the island. It celebrated the beauty of its physical aspects, its contradictions and various cultures, and grieved its suffering.
[caption id="attachment_1096126" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Artist and author Sarah Beckett says Iere is both a journey of the heart paying homage to TT, and a meditation on how our surroundings shape us and how we shape the place in which we live. - Photo by Faith Ayoung[/caption]
“Iere is both a journey of the heart paying homage to this land, and a meditation on how our surroundings shape us and how we, in turn, sh
