The vivid world of Sarah Beckett

Beckett, a painter, first came to Trinidad in the 1960s, left in 1970s when the romance that had brought her here from Britain ended, and then returned ten years ago. “I don’t know,” she answers when asked why she came back, though after the interview she sends an email explaining that a friend gave her a copy of Derek Walcott’s Omeros and she was overwhelmed by it. Omeros was published in 1990, and cited by the Nobel judges in their tribute to Walcott when he was awarded the prize in 1992.

“I’ve been very blessed here,” Beckett says. She uses religious phraseology readily. “All art is a prayer,” she says at one point. Her bookshelf has several books by and about the psychologist Carl Jung, who she says saw psychiatry as a kind of theology. “I think painting is about living on the edges of one’s imagination,” she says. “We live in a quotidian world, and I like being drawn out of it by a beautiful bowl of fruit or a view out of a window.”

She has always exhibited in Trinidad, and there are people here who have her earliest works. “Trinidad’s beauty continues, despite our depredations,” she says. “I think all young countries go through a similar process, of defining your own aesthetic, where to put the stresses, what is considered important.”

She admits that living here has influenced her art. “There’s the Trinidad light, my shapes are more lyrical, feminine,” she says. When she exhibits in England, she adds, the people there always remark on the vividness of the colours, even in pieces she doesn’t consider very bright.

She has held several exhibitions here. In 1992, she did Waiting Women, which dealt with exactly what its title says. Her 1997 show, titled Cathedrals of Science, features paintings of the Temple-by-the-Sea, prayer flags, and other religious symbols. Her 2005 exhibition, titled Trinidad Symphony in Blue, also went to Amsterdam.

“It is impossible for an artist to produce serious work under three years,” Beckett says. “You need time to go into the black hole, disappear, then you recoup and come out.”Beckett lives in Cascade. Her house-cum-studio is neatly tucked away behind a high wooden fence, painted white, at the side of the road.