Lawrence Scott

The ver­sion of this ar­ti­cle that orig­i­nal­ly ap­peared on page B38 of the Sun­day Guardian on Jan­u­ary 20, 2013, ap­peared to in­cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fy the pub­lish­er of Derek Wal­cott's Tie­pe­lo's Hound. The book is pub­lished by Faber and Faber. We were hap­py to clar­i­fy this in the cor­rect­ed ver­sion pub­lished be­low.

It im­me­di­ate­ly caught my eye, in the left hand cor­ner of the gallery: Ca­paro Land­scape. I stood be­fore it, moved, and then re­turned to the be­gin­ning of the ex­hi­bi­tion to make my way through Jack­ie Hink­son's re­mark­able ret­ro­spec­tive.

Ca­paro Land­scape was paint­ed in 1985. It is a wa­ter­colour, 25x19�". It ap­pears to be a straight­for­ward paint­ing with its three main planes of colour, a sort of olive green, tak­ing up half the bot­tom half of the paint­ing: a cane piece in cen­tral Trinidad. This con­trasts with the brown burnt-earth colour of a ploughed field along­side it. The up­per half is cobalt blue, streaked with white–the fre­quent for­ma­tion of cir­rus clouds we of­ten see over Trinidad.

As well as colour un­der bright sun­light, there are the shad­ows. In the fore­ground, two small fig­ures of sug­ar­cane work­ers walk along a trace in vary­ing shades of the olive green and the burnt-earth colour of the ploughed field.

For a rel­a­tive­ly small pant­i­ng, it over­whelmed me with its sense of space, light and shad­ow, the im­men­si­ty of the world in which we live and work, as I fol­lowed the small fig­ures on that land­scape. The many criss­cross­ings of lines in the fore­ground cre­ate a sense of con­stric­tion, which is con­trast­ed with the free­dom of the sky; those swathes of white and blue.

It was lat­er con­firmed for me, as I stood be­fore an­oth­er paint­ing, and lis­tened to Hink­son take me through his wa­ter­colour process, that the white is the white of the pa­per.

I al­so learnt what I have just said about the paint­ing and the feel­ings it gen­er­at­ed in me would not be part of Hink­son's aims. It would not be the metaphor­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion that would be para­mount for him. It would be the com­po­si­tion, the bal­anc­ing of light and shad­ow; it would be about the fre­quent­ly men­tioned "weight," which is his con­cern in the ap­pli­ca­tion of paint and its ef­fect.

Some view­ers might think it dif­fi­cult to get be­yond the fig­u­ra­tive in Hink­son. That would be to look in the wrong way; too su­per­fi­cial. It is not Hink­son's aim to il­lus­trate. He gets be­yond il­lus­tra­tion to that "some­thing else" that the eye of a painter catch­es in the land­scape or the fig­ure.

This might sound per­verse when we look at some of that ob­vi­ous record­ing of ar­chi­tec­ture in his paint­ings: the cap­tur­ing of ad­ver­tise­ments, the stand­ing or the sit­ting fig­ure at a bus stop or in a rum shop. It would be a mis­take to see these as il­lus­tra­tions, or sim­ply fig­u­ra­tive. To see more, you have to pay at­ten­tion to the process and the medi­ums used.

Among the vast ar­ray of Hink­son's ret­ro­spec­tive, we have come to recog­nise as un­mis­take­ably his the hous­es, the fig­ures, the land­scapes and the seascapes; there is a wealth of styles to ap­pre­ci­ate and learn from.

Hink­son has been paint­ing all his life. Hink­son has been learn­ing all his life. He has been keep­ing faith with paint­ing, with wa­ter­colour as well as the oth­er medi­ums he us­es, oils and acrylics. The for­mer was once an enor­mous chal­lenge, the lat­ter his cho­sen medi­um for the abra­sive, harsh­er por­traits of ur­ban land­scape. There are al­so his ink draw­ings, his pen­cil and crayons.

The ex­hi­bi­tion stays up till the end of Jan­u­ary. If you have not al­ready got there, you are miss­ing out on what for me was a unique cul­tur­al ex­pe­ri­ence hap­pen­ing in Trinidad. It teach­es you about art in Trinidad over sev­er­al decades, but, above all, it teach­es you about an art which has its roots in one of the rad­i­cal move­ments of Eu­ro­pean art, when artists left their stu­dios to go out out­side with their easels and paints in or­der to paint what they saw; to paint the or­di­nary. It was a move­ment that came to rep­re­sent the great de­moc­ra­ti­sa­tion of art.

I kept re­turn­ing to Ca­paro Land­scape, then I would shoot off to some oth­er cor­ner of the gallery to ex­am­ine more favourites.

A ret­ro­spec­tive is a great ex­pe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you hap­pen to catch Jack­ie Hink­son in the gallery. This is not some­thing I usu­al­ly de­light in: the artist there at the ready to talk me in­to de­spair and bore­dom, de­priv­ing me of my free­dom to look and feel. But Hink­son is such a ret­i­cent com­men­ta­tor, that it is more of an in­ti­mate con­ver­sa­tion about things you might no­tice, than a ser­mon of cer­tain­ties that some oth­er artists favour.

I had ar­rived in Port-of-Spain to launch my new nov­el, Light Falling on Bam­boo, in­spired by the paint­ings and the life and times of Michel Jean Caz­abon. The ti­tle it­self could be the ti­tle of one of Hink­son's paint­ings. I had been re­search­ing over these last five years this rad­i­cal tra­di­tion in Eu­ro­pean art, and how it had af­fect­ed our un­der­stand­ing of Caz­abon's paint­ings in the 19th cen­tu­ry.

Much had tak­en place dur­ing Caz­abon's life and af­ter since the rad­i­cal­ism of the pre-im­pres­sion­ists of the Bar­bi­zon School to which Caz­abon be­longed. Hink­son has learnt from all that has tak­en place since. What is re­mark­able is that he is still talk­ing about the ear­li­est of Eng­lish wa­ter­colourists like Girtin and Cot­man from the 18th and ear­ly part of the 19th cen­tu­ry who, to­geth­er with Turn­er and Con­sta­ble, were Caz­abon's Eng­lish in­flu­ences.

Hink­son told me that when he first looked at Caz­abon he found him dull. He was talk­ing about light and colour. He was talk­ing about him­self as an artist in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. He was talk­ing about a ten­sion he felt when he re­turned with his train­ing from Cana­da and Paris, a kind of cri­sis for the artist, trained out­side the trop­ics with its bright nat­ur­al light and the colour of its fo­liage, and per­haps, even more im­por­tant­ly, its rhythms and feel, the ges­tures and stances of its fig­ures, that made him al­ter his meth­ods and change his palette. These were some of the ten­sions I felt that Caz­abon had ex­pe­ri­enced, and which I ex­plored in my nov­el. Hink­son was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing them yet again with a whole host of oth­er in­flu­ences and un­der­stand­ings about paint, about light and shad­ow; find­ing chal­lenges and so­lu­tions ap­pro­pri­ate to his age, much the way Caz­abon had done in his own.

You must al­so sit and lis­ten to Jack­ie Hink­son talk­ing to Christo­pher Laird in a se­ries of videoed in­ter­views about paint­ing and sculp­ture. Talk and view­ing feed in­to each oth­er beau­ti­ful­ly.

Jack­ie Hink­son's mem­oir What Things are True is now avail­able. Read­ing the mem­oir and view­ing the ret­ro­spec­tive is a unique ed­u­ca­tion through an artist's life and his life's work.

I have come to no­tice a con­nec­tion be­tween the paint­ing of Hink­son and the po­et­ry of Derek Wal­cott. In Wal­cott's Tiepo­lo's Hound, a fic­tion­al bi­o­graph­i­cal po­em on Camille Pis­sar­ro, there is this hymn to the or­di­nary that Hink­son's work al­so con­tains:

In his life's dusk, though hand and eye grow weary,

his con­cen­tra­tion strength­ens in its skill,

some crit­ics think his work is or­di­nary,

but the or­di­nary is the mir­a­cle.

Or­di­nary love and or­di­nary death,

or­di­nary suf­fer­ing, or­di­nary birth,

the or­di­nary cou­plets of our breath,

or­di­nary heav­en, or­di­nary earth.

(Derek Wal­cott's Tiepo­lo's Hound, page 155. Faber and Faber.)

Lawrence Scott is the au­thor of sev­er­al prize-win­ning books. His lat­est nov­el Light Falling on Bam­boo is pub­lished by Tin­dall Street Press.