Boscoe Holder

The evolution of my ideas has forced me to return home...

Boscoe Holder is the first artist that I ever made me dream. In my teenage years I visited Trinidad's Port-Of-Spain small Museum just to look at his paintings weekly. He worked primarily on the female form, and in darker women skin tones, contrasting with natural Caribbean colours. 

I feel with Boscoe Holder I can have a good start, as I believe he saw beauty and Trinidad in unconventional places as I do. He never strayed too far into the abstract but would rather experiment with different techniques. 

After revisiting his work , I now realise that travel and time away from home have made me stray away from my natural flow. This is the premise of my next piece.

Biography ...

Boscoe Holder was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in the early 1920s. He died on 21.4.2007 at his residence in Newtown, Port of Spain.

He already painted when he was five years old and was an accomplished pianist at a very early age as well, playing for the wealthy French Creole, Chinese and Portuguese at their functions by the time he was 9 years old. In his late teens he formed his own dance company. In his dance he used traditional Afro-Caribbean interpretations: shango, bongo and bélé. He frequently used his dancers as models for his paintings. In 1950 Boscoe Holder moved to London,England where he danced and performed on the piano at all the well-known theatres and clubs. By that time he was married to Sheila Clarke who was his lead dancer in his own dance company and also became his favourite model for his painting. He has staged many one man exhibitions in Trinidad and exhibited also in New York, Helsinki, Stockholm, Ostende and England. At the end of the 1960s he returned to his native land where he established himself soon as one of the top painters, not only in Trinidad and Tobago, but throughout the Caribbean. Boscoe Holder has exhibited frequently in most of the Caribbean islands and his paintings can be found in many collections around the world.