Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

Cel­e­brat­ed artist Glenn Roopc­hand plans on mak­ing a gift of a mur­al to the peo­ple of T&T. The mur­al, Na­tion­al Di­ver­si­ty, is a hep­tas­tich (sev­en-pan­el work) that will show as­pects of na­tion­al life. He es­ti­mates the val­ue of the work at over $400,000, and hopes to for­mal­ly present it to the Na­tion­al Mu­se­um and Art Gallery by mid-June.

The mu­se­um did not re­turn a phone call re­quest­ing com­ment on the ac­qui­si­tion.

Roopc­hand, who has lived in the US for the past 23 years but vis­its T&T reg­u­lar­ly, said the idea for the mur­al was born last year.

"I had a con­ver­sa­tion with the Con­sul Gen­er­al at the Con­sulate in New York," he said in an in­ter­view at his Wood­brook stu­dio on East­er Mon­day. "We talked about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of dec­o­rat­ing the walls of the con­sulate, which are huge and emp­ty. We al­so thought about some­thing that talks about the di­verse cul­ture of the coun­try and sud­den­ly this idea popped in my head. I cre­at­ed some ma­que­ttes and showed them to her."

He added, "It dawned on me that I'm quite a suc­cess­ful artist and my suc­cess is based on the amount of pa­tron­age that I got from the coun­try–the peo­ple of T&T. I said maybe I should do­nate this paint­ing."

The ma­que­ttes–"study pieces," he calls them–are col­lage and acrylic on can­vas board and are paint­ed in his dis­tinc­tive style blend­ing Cu­bism and ab­stract im­pres­sion­ism. They rep­re­sent, re­spec­tive­ly, re­li­gion, sports, cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, youth and progress, fes­ti­vals, old T&T, and Buc­coo Reef.

He con­sid­ers the reef the "bel­ly of the Caribbean," he said, and the ac­tu­al paint­ing will be a 30-inch x 40-inch in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the reef and the life it sup­ports. At its cen­tre, he said, would be a pan con­tain­ing a pearl. The piece he de­scribes echoes a work he showed last year, With­in My Caribbean Bel­ly, a mixed me­dia paint­ing that al­so has a pearl at its cen­tre. (In­ci­den­tal­ly, he pre­sent­ed the com­pan­ion piece to that paint­ing to the UWI, Mona cam­pus af­ter an ex­hi­bi­tion at the Art So­ci­ety last year cel­e­brat­ing the 50th an­niver­saries of in­de­pen­dence of T&T and Ja­maica.)

He's al­ready had of­fers for the pieces in the hep­tap­tych, he said–a col­lec­tor of­fered $60,000 for one piece, which is where Roopc­hand took the es­ti­mat­ed val­ue of the mur­al from–and the ma­que­ttes al­ready have a buy­er.

The com­plet­ed pieces, which are "75 per cent fin­ished" at his New Jer­sey stu­dio, will be giv­en to the mu­se­um and then loaned to the con­sulate, he said. The fin­ished works will be acrylic on can­vas.