Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

For In­dra Per­sad Milowe, art lives in­side her. As a stu­dent, she fell in love with art but set it aside in pur­suit of a more prac­ti­cal life that would cov­er the bills. How­ev­er, now re­tired, Milowe has re­turned to paint­ing as though she had nev­er left it.

Born in Debe, life would take Milowe to dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try and dif­fer­ent parts of the world. She grew up on Rapsey Street, Curepe, at­tend­ed Curepe Pres­by­ter­ian School, then passed for St Au­gus­tine Girls’ High School be­fore at­tend­ing Art Sum­mer Class­es at UWI, St Au­gus­tine.

“My par­ents said if I con­tin­ued art, I’d nev­er make any mon­ey,” Milowe re­called in a con­ver­sa­tion with WE mag­a­zine re­cent­ly. In­stead, they want­ed her to go to nurs­ing school in Lon­don.

At 18, she moved to Eng­land to study Gen­er­al, Oph­thalmic and Psy­chi­atric Nurs­ing. From there, she moved to Val­let­ta, Mal­ta, to work as a British nurse over­seas, and lat­er to Mi­a­mi, Flori­da, where she met her hus­band and even­tu­al­ly set­tled.

While she at­tend­ed art shows here and there, it wouldn’t be un­til Milowe re­tired in 2019 from a life­time of ser­vice in the med­ical field that she would re­turn to art in a se­ri­ous way.

She con­vert­ed half of their med­ical of­fice in­to a stu­dio and gallery. She was al­ways des­tined for suc­cess with a paint­brush in hand.

Her first col­lec­tion was ti­tled ‘Fes­ti­vals & Folk­lore of Trinidad, West In­dies’. A week af­ter her first show in the Unit­ed States, COVID-19 be­gan shut­ting down the coun­try and the world. How­ev­er, it would not ham­per Milowe. She moved her pieces to dig­i­tal, where art gal­leries and art shows were show­cas­ing peo­ple’s work on­line. More eyes saw her work on­line than those who would have seen it at an art gallery. Milowe’s ear­ly work was be­gin­ning to get her recog­nised.

Af­ter the pan­dem­ic, Milowe would trav­el to North Africa, re­leas­ing her sec­ond col­lec­tion, My Jour­ney to Mo­roc­co. Her third col­lec­tion was based on a vis­it to Bali and was ti­tled “Beau­ti­ful Ubud, Bali”.

Her art has been gain­ing such in­ter­na­tion­al at­ten­tion that Mod­ern Re­nais­sance Mag­a­zine, per­haps the most pop­u­lar mag­a­zine for art in the world, fea­tured four of Milowe’s paint­ings on Car­ni­val in T&T.

Milowe has nev­er lost her love and sense of home. Much of her work is based on T&T.

In fact, her first piece of art­work was her Agee’s kitchen–a paint­ing of her late Agee wear­ing a sari and cook­ing in clay pots. It was in­spired by her roots in Bood­hoo Trace, Debe. Though paint­ing from afar, Milowe’s work would al­so gain the at­ten­tion of this na­tion.

The Ro­tun­da Gallery in the Red House in Port-of-Spain has ex­hib­it­ed her pieces 26 times since it opened in 2020. “I am al­ways fas­ci­nat­ed by their ‘Call for Sub­mis­sion’ and spend a lot of time re­search­ing the top­ics which keep me in touch with Trinidad,” she said.

Though Milowe didn’t prac­tise art for most of her adult life, the flame that ig­nit­ed ear­ly in her life for paint­ing nev­er went out. She re­called how an im­por­tant en­counter with a teacher made her view art dif­fer­ent­ly.

Milowe ex­plained, “Be­cause of my high school teacher Mrs Hel­ga Mo­hammed, at St Au­gus­tine Girls’ High School ... she was from Madrid, Spain, and she was mar­ried to a Trinida­di­an, and she was teach­ing art. The first day of class she wrote on the black­board, ‘Art is not just a hang­ing on the wall; it is in every as­pect of your dai­ly life’.”

That would stay with Milowe wher­ev­er she went. She looked at art dif­fer­ent­ly from that day for­ward. She looked at art in her clothes, her food, and in every­thing else. “It’s a pre­sen­ta­tion of your­self, a re­flec­tion of your­self. My whole life was turned in­to dif­fer­ent types of art,” she said.

It fills her with pride that her art, which she fell in love with in this coun­try, now dons the walls of places like the Ro­tun­da, and she hopes it can help cit­i­zens view their coun­try dif­fer­ent­ly.

She ex­plained, “Trinida­di­ans, es­pe­cial­ly the younger gen­er­a­tion, they have to ap­pre­ci­ate cul­ture in T&T. I know it’s true there is a lot of crime but when you look at peo­ple like Pe­ter Min­shall and Beryl McBurnie–that’s who I grew up with–they have so much to of­fer.”

She in­sist­ed art should not be un­der­es­ti­mat­ed when it comes to help­ing a so­ci­ety un­der­stand it­self. Milowe added, “Pub­lic art in­creas­es peo­ple’s aware­ness. You could be sit­ting in a square and watch this beau­ti­ful piece of art. It wakes you up, and that’s some­thing I would like to do in Trinidad.”

She of­ten thinks about Curepe Junc­tion as a place where she can have a burst of cre­ativ­i­ty. Though paint­ing from a world away, Trinidad re­mains a vivid pic­ture in the mind of In­dra Per­sad Milowe, and she is a tes­ta­ment that pas­sion nev­er dies, even if it is put on pause for decades.