Three artists embrace Mother Nature in Gran Couva

Sometimes light emerges from unimaginable darkness.

When the pandemic gripped the world and sent us all into lockdown, three Trinidadian women artists ventured out of their homes and out of the gloom to find the light abundantly clear in Gran Couva, in Central Trinidad.

“2020 started with covid19, and I had just finished breast cancer surgery,” said Greer Jones-Woodham.

“One day, I met Karen De Verteuil in the grocery store. She suggested we paint in Gran Couva, and that was the beginning of my healing.”

Soon, Beverley Fitzwilliam-Harries made the trip to Gran Couva as well. The three artists explored the lush greenery.

“Being in the landscape was important,” said Jones-Woodham. “It was powerful getting out of our own space and into another, unfamiliar space.”

“I learned to see a place I am familiar with through their eyes,” said De Verteuil. “I saw things I never noticed before.”

With an artist's eye, they framed scenes that captured their imagination and began to paint.

A traveller’s palm, unfolding like a giant fan, captured all three artists' attention. The flaming red flowers of a Macuna Bennettii vine burst from the greenery and onto Jones-Woodham’s canvas; a banana tree pops into view in a De Verteuil painting. Fitzwilliam-Harries painted begonias, crotons, torches, lilies, ferns and hummingbird flowers. They painted in full view of the Picmock trees on the hillside.

“We used a lot of green in our paintings. We were all romancing turquoise and cerulean (blue). We played with red and orange,” said Fitzwilliam-Harries.

They arrived in Gran Couva early in the morning with canvases, paint brushes and paint – oil for De Verteuil and Jones-Woodham; acrylic paints and acrylic markers for Fitzwilliam-Harries. Jones-Woodham kept her supplies in a toolbox.

“If you see the chaos and confusion that came tumbling out of that box,” De Verteuil laughed.

They spent the day following the light circling and penetrating majestic samaan trees and a Bottle Brush tree.

“In covid, we were always searching for beauty. During that time, the soul couldn’t have been more depressed,” said Jones-Woodham.

In the solitude of their surroundings, they noted subtle changes in light happening around them.

“We were always watching the direction of the sun and where the negative spaces were,” said Fitzwilliam-Harries. “I learned so much about the use of light and the effect of heat on colour. The grass is so light – almost white– so I had to use my imagination and use mauve and red to capture what was happening. I learned how to walk through a garden and create a space to work and the camaraderie sent us on a trajectory we didn’t have in town.”

It was their escape from a pandemic and an emotional awakening – a deeper appreciation of the environment they all loved; more awareness of the vivid colours of that landscape. They fine-tuned their understanding of how nature impacted their senses in a time that sometimes seemed senseless.

“I always loved nature, but this time I really got into the bones of it because of covid,” said Fitzwilliam-Harries.

“I learned to embrace mother nature again,” said Jones-Woodham. “We had covid hanging over our heads. We didn’t know if we would survive. I had dealt with cancer, and it felt important to get out of myself. I could not heal unless I immersed myself in creativity. I remember on the last day of my treatment, the doctor said, ‘Go and live your life’, and that is what I tried to do in Gran Couva.”

They played jazz music while they painted.

“I like Nina Simone,” said Jones-Woodham. “Birds flying high, you know how I feel. Sun in the sky, you know how I feel. Breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day,” Simone sang in Feeling Good.

Fitzwilliam-Harries remembered De Verteuil saying, ‘I wish I could paint as Nina Simone sings.’

They listened to Amy Winehouse and conjured up the spirit and memories of Trinidadian painters like Isaiah Boodhoo who had been their mentor.

“Important issues came up for us women artists. Sometimes we’d get stuck and call an artist’s name who had passed – like Isaiah Boodoo,” said De Verteuil.

“At the end of the day, we saw how our souls captured space,” said Jones-Woodham.

The landscapes they painted fall within Impressionism developed in 19th century France when artists stepped out of their studios and into the outdoors to capture landscapes and everyday life. Other artists called the impressionists rebellious. Breaking the rules of traditional art and transcending boundaries made the impressionist iconoclasts. They were fiercely individualistic in their interpretations of life around them, but they all had one fixation in common: light and how it reflected on time and space.

“I am trying to be more impressionistic,” said De Verteuil, “but it is difficult to let go of reality.”

It’s not far-fetched to say the darkness and uncertainty of the pandemic led these three artists to a greater appreciation of the distinct and fleeting light of the tropics.

“It’s all about the light,” each artist insisted.

For these artists, capturing the light is as important as capturing the plants, trees and people.

“The pandemic sparked new interpretations and a new appreciation of things we took for granted, and this realisation oozes from this art,” said Jones-Woodham.

De Verteuil’s painting of a banana tree drenched in yellow, green and blue light captures the vividness of nature left untroubled during covid19.

Along with nature scenes, De Verteuil has a telling portrait of four women with arms entwined behind their backs called After Covid. No features appear on the women’s faces. They are all of us appreciating the first moment when we could reach out and touch someone again.

Quilted houses make up one of Jones-Woodham’s sculptures called All That Glitters. The spinning stand reveals totems with birds and a hand holding a gun.

“This is the chaos among us,” said Jones-Woodham. “This captures abuse, crime – you know, ‘All that glitters is not gold.’”

Some of her paintings feature a small canvas inserted into the large one, which gives the landscape a three-dimensional feeling and allows for two separate scenes to be juxtaposed. It is like a snapshot inside sprawling greenery.

The three artists still meet once a week to paint in Gran Couva.

The artists work will be featured in an art show called Gran Couva Conversations at the Art Society of TT, located on the corner of Jamaican Boulevard and St Vincent Avenue, Federation Park.

Opening night will be on January 31 from 6 pm to 8.30 pm. The exhibit runs from February 1 through February 5 from noon to 6 pm.

The show will feature 15 paintings from each artist and Jones-Woodham’s five totems.

Come and experience this artistic journey from darkness to light.

Author: Debbie Jacob

BITS AND PIECES @ Movietowne Saturday 3rd November

An Artist’s Journey

Beverley with her seaside inspired, "Mayaro Again" - Photo credit Carolyn Correia (c) 2017

Twenty seventeen, the current exhibition by Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries at 101 Art Gallery, was created in acrylics and inspired by TT's landscapes and people.

The artist says TT and the Caribbean are her muse and she could not picture life anywhere else. Armed with her colouring books and craft kits in her growing years, she was constantly seeking ways to explore her creativity.

“Art was in my blood, as my extended family were creatives and my parents always supported my decision to pursue art. As a small child, I always found myself colouring on whatever I could find, including the wrapping papers of sweets,” Fitzwilliam Harries recalls.

Beverley with her Carnival themed piece, "Dames" - Photo credit Carolyn Correia (c) 2017

Her alma mater Holy Name Convent was instrumental in moulding her into an artist. Her parents also supported her passion, and she went on to major in painting at Fanshawe College of Applied Arts and Technology, Ontario, Canada.

The former art teacher at Bishop Anstey High School found that teaching and trying to create art had it challenges. She taught for 19 years and due to family commitments migrated to Jamaica for three years and St Lucia for seven years.

The turning point in her career came when she attended a few workshops in Barbados facilitated by Margaret Roseman (of Canada) and Heidi Burger (of Germany). She soon made the transition from watercolours to acrylic and launched her first solo show in 2006 with the encouragement of The Inner Gallery owner St Rachael DuBoulay. “Prior to this, I always participated in group exhibits with other artists,” Fitzwilliam Harries said.

Beverley with the abstract, "Bush Fire" - Photo credit Carolyn Correia (c) 2017

She encourages all artistes across different genres to pursue their art for the right reasons and always stay committed to learning. “You need workshops – no matter how old or experienced you are. You need to step out of your box and refresh yourself to learn new techniques etc,” she said.

The exhibition ends tomorrow at the gallery on 84 Woodford Street, Newtown, Port-of-Spain.

Author: Carolyn Correia

Evoking Caribbean Life Through Art

Tucker Valley

Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries is one of the most admired artists living and working in the country today. Admirers of Beverley's distinctive style will not be disappointed by the pieces featured in her upcoming show, at 101 Art Gallery, opening on October 14th at 10am to two in the afternoon. Featured are the stylized figures in settings and poses evoking Caribbean life that we have come to associate with a Harries piece. Beverley's use of color is bold and brash, and the effect is riveting. Her botanicals are represented in a riot of color, and even manicured landscapes take on a wild, primeval and untamed air under her brush. They are luscious and vivid, and they draw one inward.

Rain or Shine

It is always interesting to witness the evolution of an artist, and Beverley is unafraid of experimentation. Having attended a workshop in Barbados on poured painting hosted by Canadian artist Arial Lyons last January, Beverly returned home and began her own experimenting with the method; and the results are stunning.

Says the artist about these new pieces: "I pour with acrylic paints, both heavy and light flow acrylic. The acrylic is mixed with an extender and water, or sometimes just water. There are several different pouring techniques, the one I use is called a "dirty cup", that’s how you get the "melee of colour." There is also a swipe technique which I used in several pieces in order to get some definition and create semi abstract effect."

Bush Fire

Beverly explains that in some pieces she paints on top of a pour. In the work "Bush Fire" the artist painted in the bushes in the foreground in order to bring details into focus. The artist adds that the work "Chancellor Fire" is an example of another poured piece where she went in with a brush and painted in the distant fire in the hillside. The new poured work features colour that builds and blends lusciously, lending a very liquid feel to the work. The pieces are at once soothing and startling and possess something of an emotional force.

Mayaro Shade

Beverley says she has always had a strong appreciation for Art throughout her primary and secondary schooling, therefore studying Fine Art in Canada with a Painting Major seemed a natural choice. Since 1975 Beverley has taken part in several group and collective shows in Canada, Barbados and Trinidad and has had several successful solo shows both in St. Lucia, and here at home. The artist's work is part of many private collections internationally and to date she had held six solo shows.

This latest exhibition, titled simply "Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries Twenty Seventeen" is her seventh solo exhibition. This showing at 101 Art Gallery at 84 Woodford Street Newtown runs until October 25th.

Author: Simone Hamel-Smith

Starbucks Trinidad features local artwork from Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries

Installation using Coffee Pigment for Starbucks, South Park by Beverley Fitzwilliam-Harries

Local Colour Amplified

Doubles 2

Local colour refers to the customs and typical features of a place. In art, the term also means the actual colour of an object as it appears in nature. In her fourth solo show, Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries takes T&T’s local colour—including a line of hungry customers at a doubles stand, the ice cream vendor or palette man, a view of the Wildfowl Trust and a crowd of coconut trees standing in the heat—and amplifies it by deviating from actual hues. Her colour usage is unapologetically loud and energetic.

Fitzwilliam Harries gives routine visuals a Fauvist touch. Her canvases are lit up with intense lime greens, lemon yellows, cerulean and crimson. She does not use black or brown. Instead, cobalt blue and violet become the voice for shadows so that the darker areas in her images sing as much as other parts in a chorus of shapes and pigments.

Much of the artist’s images have been executed en plein air but she goes beyond what she observes at each site to share what she feels—offering an expressive route that takes viewers across the islands of T&T: into Paramin, off to Mayaro, now to King’s Bay then to Parlatuvier.

Each piece is also a journey back and forth among the spaces of foreground, middle ground and background. She pushes and pulls colour, taking the viewer’s eyes to a detail nearby or to one in the distance. She also allows eyes to traverse layers of paint—red vibrating beneath blue, for example, and pink sitting on green.

Her incorporation of tissue paper and coarsely woven canvas that have been crumpled add rich texture and further dynamism to the works, as acrylic paint escapes the cracks in some instances, while in others, paint is trapped in the creases.

The vibrancy of the art is reinforced by her move to works of a larger scale. For the first time, she presents pieces with dimensions that include 36, 39 and 60 inches, sizes that affect the bold impact of her colours.

Fitzwilliam Harries is not, however, the first local artist to frame scapes in brilliant hues. The work of Cynthia McLean and resident Erik Feely come to mind. It would be interesting to see how she might experiment further with the possibilities of colour. In the end, though, her show is a shot of adrenaline that quickens the heartbeat even if that rush is sometimes dampened by some pieces, such as Coconut Fronds 2 and Blanchi View, which keep the local colour at an expected level.

Beverley Fitzwilliam Harries’ exhibition closes today at the Art Society, corner Jamaica Boulevard and St Vincent Avenue, Federation Park. Opening hours: 10 am- 5 pm.

Author: Marsha Pearce

The Paintings of Bev Fitzwilliam Harries

Purple Patrea

Why are there lavender shadows on fresh green grass? Why is the sky behind Mille Fleurs that impenetrable red? The answer is not a singular one. Part of that answer is a combination of an artist’s knowledge of colour theory on one hand and nearly unbridled emotional impulse on the other. Bev Fitzwilliam Harries is an expressionist—a painter who shoots from the heart when it comes to colour albeit with a kind of trained spontaneity. Hers are not “realistic” colours but emotional ones. The sky over the Magnificent Seven is not actually the colour of the Red House, but is figuratively red as Mille Fleurs (and Boissiere House) are threatened by the collective, bloodied axes of developers who lust to tear them down and put up poured concrete hotels. The shadows on the green grass are hues of purple because in the blazing noontide sun of the Caribbean, if you look at a thing then shut your eyes you can still see the thing on the backs of your eyelids but with the colours inverted—so that a sour green becomes a serious mauve. And if you then filter that vision through your longing for the shade, the colours might shift yet again to a purplish colour at once cool but light, promising even a soothing fragrance—like lavender.

Seagrapes

In theory, Fitzwilliam is not so much a painter of complementary colours (i.e., opposing colours like yellow-green and mauve) but a triadic painter. Her palette typically consists of triplets of colours located equidistant on the colour wheel that art teachers make their university students create and study in their first year: true yellow meets ultramarine blue meets true red; an orange meets a turquoise verging on Prussian blue and then collides with a maroon; a sour green meets a bluish purple then meets a red verging on orange. But her colours are always a little off this perfect colour arithmetic, like a garden growing a little wild, and charming in the process. So in her painting “Seagrapes” the violets in the ‘violet-green-orange’ triad vibrate between blues and reds, dazzling like that blinding illusion on one’s sunburnt retinas; the greens vibrate between that of a young mango and the pale cerulean of shallow seawater; and the orange dips in and out of deep hibiscus red.

Colour wheel painted by British entomologist Moses Harris in the 18th centuryand adopted by colour theorists in the subsequent century

As with many Trinidadian artists, the development of Fitzwilliam’s education as a painter can be traced back to her schooling abroad. In her case, these foundational years were the three spent at Fanshawe College of Applied Arts & Technology in Ontario, Canada back in the late 1970s. In Trinidad, university level training in the visual arts (whether applied arts or art history) has never reached the degree-granting level of Jamaica’s Edna Manley College or Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s Artes Plásticas institutes. Even founding members of the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago such as Sybil Atteck back in the early twentieth century had to migrate to receive their foundation training and sadly this has not changed as contemporary artists such as Christopher Cozier and Dean Arlen can attest. Since her college years as a painting major in Canada, the ever-curious Fitzwilliam has diversified her knowledge of art techniques at a variety of watercolour, ceramic and other workshops in Canada, Trinidad and Barbados, giving her increasing insight into her own theory of colour, light and texture.

Fitzwilliam’s ‘mad’ colours are thus anchored in a theoretical method known to trained artists such as herself, but of course with her own masterful departures and flourishes—the artistic license of one of Trinidad and Tobago’s finest and highly regarded nature painters.

Wildflower Park

The ‘mad’ use of colour is a distinctly modern approach and earned its earliest exponents the name “Fauves” (i.e., Wild Beasts) in early 20th century France and Germany. But while the Fauves imposed irrational colours on the otherwise drab urban environments and wintry forests of Western Europe, Fitzwilliam has seen at least some of her ‘mad’ colours with her own eyes in the riotous tropical environment that she pursues in her landscapes, still lives and occasional figure paintings. Hers is not as ‘beastly’ a departure from representational colour as that of, say, Andre Derain’s kaleidoscopic paintings of the otherwise monochromatic Thames River. Fitzwilliam’s project involves a more equitable exchange between her florid Caribbean environment and her passionate response thereto. She straddles the empirical and the emotional. Nevertheless, the horizontal painting “Wild Flower Park” is quite reminiscent in its colours and design of Fauve works that Sybil Atteck might have seen during her studies with the German Expressionists. And a painting such as “Red Fig” or “Red Cocoa” is as wild a beast as any in its complete substitution of leaf green with red, sky blue with pale yellow or bark brown with blue.

Red Fig

Red Cocoa

Unlike the early twentieth century Fauves, Fitzwilliam paints in acrylics not oils. The quick-drying quality of these coloured polymers lends itself readily to the artist’s plein air approach. She sets up somewhere in nature, paints for a few hours, and finishes before the light changes too much. She can sit in the Savannah, capture a particular moment in her quick-drying pigments, toss the dirty brush water in a drain, and be on her way without smudging a still-wet painting. Her concern with capturing the ephemeral qualities of daylight is evident in paintings such as the architectural “San Antonio,” and the landscapes “Petit Trou” and “Purple Patrea”. Her almost Monet-like, Impressionist refusal to use black paint causes even her shadows to have an inner life, much like the midday shadows of the Caribbean that find themselves assaulted by reflected light from all sides.

In addition to their plein air expedience, the bold, somewhat flatter colours of acrylics lend themselves to the partial abstraction that can result from Fitzwilliam’s painterly technique, one which revels in the buttery qualities of opaque paint and the lyrical trails of brush hairs. This is painting that doesn’t seek to fool the eye with convincing naturalism but rather encourages the viewer to enjoy the presence of the paint, and the instantaneous decisions and confident brush-craft by which marks were laid down.

Croton and Rio

Assisting, and sometimes containing all this wild colour is a lively sense of composition wherein intersecting diagonals and curves are often pressed together and/or cut off by tight framing. In paintings such as “Croton and Rio” and “Shady Araceae” one has the choice to let the eyes scroll around endlessly in the vibrating picture, like a bachac ant who has lost his way, or expand our view through imagination to some greater landscape of which this is simply a busy little corner. A particularly beautiful example of these internally rambling landscape close-ups is “Central Landscape” which deftly evokes the soft hills of Central Trinidad even though they are painted purple and barely visible through stands of boundary plants. Only still lives, such as “Pink and Red Torches” and Red Heliconia,” even attempt to fix us for any time on a featured object, even though these too derive tension and movement from the asymmetrical location of the subject and myriad shadows and/or reflections.

Central Landscape

There is a rugged angularity in the forms of Fitzwilliam’s subjects, not at all geometric but rather heavy and robust in the manner of wood-carvings or ceramic sculpture. This is because the artist draws directly on the canvas with her paintbrush rather than fussing with pencils or charcoal beforehand. The thick, sometimes shaky outline can give a “Cordyline” or “Canna Lily” a slightly macabre quality despite its exuberant chroma—not unlike an old-time Carnival costume. Surrounded by the works of Fitzwilliam, one is eventually struck by the red under-painting that lurks beneath her images, peeping out from around the edge of leaf or palm frond here or down in the shadows of a tree or even a breaking wave there. The artist explains that she primes her canvases red as a mid-tone and builds paintings out of this unusual base colour, going lighter or darker than red as the need arises. Thus, red is used to inspire and anchor the wild colours that ‘ramajay’ on top of it.

Cordyline

Painting nature in the Caribbean is a decision to court or cleverly avoid cliché. The 19th century Caribbean painters, such as Michel Jean Cazabon in Trinidad and Estéban Chartrand in Cuba, helped to construct notions of nationhood around the depiction of the landscape, its flora, fauna and native people. Since then, landscapes, and nature painting in general, have often been mired in a stagnant nostalgia which at once longs for a picaresque simplicity that can be described politically as “colonial” and adopts the foreign gaze of the tourist or visitor, with the aim of enticing disposable dollars from those very foreigners through visual pretensions of quaintness. One need only ask oneself whether pastel-coloured paintings of the Eiffel tower hang in the Louvre or on aluminium easels on the tourist-beaten streets of Paris to know which category many Caribbean landscapes fall into. Certainly, when the Eiffel Tower was still new, Delaunay and others rendered masterful cubistic paintings and drawings of its novel, mechanistic monstrosity but the umpteenth revisit to the Eiffel by any fairly capable painter more than a century hence falls squarely under the umbrella of kitsch.

So painting landscapes, forest interiors, and florals is a chancy decision in our blossom-strewn, bromeliad-crowned, vine-draped, tourist-beaten Caribbean. Here the painter becomes the mongoose flirting with the fangs of ‘nature cliché.’ Perhaps more than any others Caribbean and Chinese nature painters always hazard these paralysing fangs as they tackle well-trodden nature topics in well-established painting techniques in a visual tradition that has arguably helped to defined the art traditions at home and abroad. The productions in this tradition can meet with great, contested or middling success, but sometimes also with terribly uninteresting results.

The danger of paralysis is not necessarily a reason to be daunted. The contemporary nature paintings of some Caribbean artists, such as Fitzwilliam and Jamaica’s Judy Ann MacMillan for example, manage to explore light, time, surface quality, expression, and even allegory and symbolism permitting us a glance of Caribbean nature’s unending promise for those who would bring an un-jaded, piercing gaze. Why oughtn’t a painter flirt with the fangs of cliché to continue ennobling this tradition?

In conversations with the artist, one discovers immediately that Bev Fitzwilliam is quite aware of the traditions to which she belongs as an Expressionistic Caribbean nature painter. So it is not with the ahistorical innocence of a “naïve” that Bev Fitzwilliam braves, or perhaps disregards, the cutlass edge between the sometimes-studious, sometimes-intuitive exploration of Caribbean nature and the weather-beaten path of the quaint ‘tourist painting.’ Rather it is with the wisdom of an experienced woodsman that she beats a path through the familiar edges of the bush to bring back something wilder.

Author: Lawrence Waldron, Ph.D.