Car­ol Quash

At just 19, artist Shiv­anie Thomas has al­ready seen her work dis­played twice this year at the Cen­tral Bank Mu­se­um in Port-of-Spain.

On March 8, Thomas’s Joseph the Teacher draw­ing and Let My Peo­ple Go sculp­ture took cen­tre stage at the Women in Art Bi­en­ni­al Com­pe­ti­tion 2025, where she won first place in both the Draw­ing and Sculp­ture cat­e­gories. At the time, she was a stu­dent at Bish­op Anstey High School, Port -of-Spain, where she stud­ied Art, Span­ish, and French.

A few months lat­er, three of her pieces—John the Bap­tist, Riv­er Par­adise, and My Grand­fa­ther in Tetrad—were again show­cased at the mu­se­um dur­ing Paint­ings in the Gar­den VII, a New York-based char­i­ty ex­hi­bi­tion that de­buted in T&T on Au­gust 28 and ran un­til Sep­tem­ber 9.

Thomas told WE, “The first two paint­ings I ever did were con­nect­ed to the deaths of my grand­par­ents,” who passed away just months apart in 2020 dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“I used art as a cop­ing mech­a­nism to deal with the grief. I paint­ed their por­traits… it’s a shame they didn’t get to see them.”

When she first be­gan paint­ing, she re­lied heav­i­ly on colour the­o­ry—the study of how colours in­ter­act and evoke emo­tion.

“Then I start­ed us­ing nat­ur­al colours,” she ex­plained. “So, it was some­thing close to re­al­ism, but not ex­act­ly re­al­ism.”

Al­though she wasn’t ini­tial­ly con­fi­dent do­ing por­traits, her art teacher Lisa Hutchin­son recog­nised her nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to cap­ture faces and en­cour­aged her to de­vel­op that skill.

“Since then,” Thomas said with a laugh, “I don’t think I’ve paint­ed any­thing with­out a face.”

Her art­work is pre­dom­i­nant­ly faith-based, heav­i­ly in­flu­enced by the doc­trine of her Sev­enth-day Ad­ven­tist be­liefs. Yet her love for na­ture con­sis­tent­ly finds its way in­to her pieces—cre­at­ing a bal­ance be­tween the spir­i­tu­al and the nat­ur­al.

“I re­al­ly just look around and en­joy na­ture,” she said. “So, I like to in­clude el­e­ments of na­ture and the Caribbean in my work. It could be a hi­bis­cus flower, a hum­ming­bird—some­thing con­nect­ed.”

She ad­mit­ted that, at one point, she strug­gled to get skin tones right.

“That’s why My Grand­fa­ther in Tetrad was done in blue,” she said. “But with time and prac­tice, my con­fi­dence grew, and I was able to re­flect nat­ur­al skin tones in my work. My John the Bap­tist piece has such a re­al­is­tic skin tone.”

So far, Thomas has com­plet­ed three col­lec­tions, the most re­cent be­ing The Role of Bib­li­cal Men in Art.

“One of my col­lec­tions is a mix­ture of paint­ings and sculp­tures, where I did the sculp­tures and paint­ed them us­ing colour the­o­ry,” she added.

She al­so ex­plores wire bend­ing, a skill she honed while at Bish­op Anstey.

“Bish­ops was where my tal­ent was re­al­ly recog­nised,” she said proud­ly. “I was in­to art from small, but school chal­lenged me to a dif­fer­ent lev­el—ex­per­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent forms and ma­te­ri­als. Imag­ine, I cre­at­ed a wire-bend­ing ver­sion of Noah’s Ark, com­plete with lit­tle an­i­mals!”

Thomas re­cent­ly be­gan work­ing as a Span­ish teacher at the Har­mon School of SDA in To­ba­go, tem­porar­i­ly set­ting aside her pen­cils and paint­brush­es.

“I would have loved to teach art, but God called me to Span­ish,” she said. “I haven’t brought my art tools from Trinidad yet, so I’m not able to work on any­thing right now.”

Dur­ing the Ju­ly/Au­gust va­ca­tion, she as­sist­ed stu­dents with their school-based as­sign­ments—some­thing she in­tends to con­tin­ue do­ing. She’s al­so us­ing her down­time to build an on­line pres­ence for her art on Face­book, In­sta­gram, and Tik­Tok.

“And I’m go­ing to give art lessons,” she said with de­ter­mi­na­tion, “while pro­duc­ing more of my work.”