Painting in Tobago
For two consecutive years I have visited the wildlife sanctuary Corbin’s Local Wildlife Park to paint in amongst their grounds, which is home to a range of native animals - many of them wild. From caiman to sally painters to hummingbirds, mot-mots and jacamars, wild animals are attracted by Corbin’s plentiful fruit trees and flowers – plantain, sugarcane, mango trees and wild heliconia are abundant, to name but a few.
As well as the wild animals, the park includes large enclosures that house rescued and threatened species native to Tobago. It provides a protected area with diverse habitats, safe away from hunters, thus allowing animals to breed and babies to be released into the forest when they are ready. Their mission is to protect the natural wildlife that is under threat on the island, largely due to hunting and deforestation.
As an artist passionate about the natural world and our relationship with it, Corbin’s is an absolute oasis to paint in. Each time I visit, I learn so much from the park’s founders Roy Corbin and Ian Wright. They’re teaching me - and everyone else who goes on a tour of the project - so much about biodiversity, the need to work with the land, and the day-to-day logistical challenges facing conservationists across the island. I’m also learning a great deal from their powerful outreach work with local hunting communities and their schools engagement work. While tourists are their primary income stream, their ‘real work’ is with the local community and reconnecting particularly young people with their native flora and fauna. Storytelling and mythology comes into play here - alongside scientific, social, cultural and historical narratives.
During these residencies, I’ve enjoyed testing techniques for painting en plein air in tropical conditions and getting to know the local plant-life. In particular, I’m finding myself returning again and again to the majestic, towering silk cotton trees dotted across the island. I’m also fascinated by the almost bamboozling experience of trekking through the rainforests, the sights, sounds - scale! - of the flora and fauna around is overwhelming for someone still acclimatising. I hope that the childlike awe and wonder I experience does not fade with time or familiarity.
The intoxicating sense of losing myself in the landscape has inspired a lot of my recent work. Armed with magnifying glasses, paints, pencils and sunblock, I’ve needed to work fast in the heat to capture details of the landscape and this has developed a more rapid, intuitive mark-making practice. I’ve then been revisiting those sketches in my UK studio; I am currently working on a series of larger oil paintings which will take months to complete. It is such a different experience to drawing in the tropical heat!
Some of the original plein air sketches and subsequent oil paintings are available for purchase via my online portfolio.