"The beauty of this is its freedom of
expression," says Althea Bastien, glancing up from the batik blinds she's
laid out on the floor for my inspection. These and her other batik fabrics
are to be exhibited at Gallery 1.2.3.4. from November 18 - 23.
"They're screens really, the old-time blinds," she explains. "People used to use them to divide a room into two sections."
They're all about five feet by one and mostly abstract designs in shades of green, or brown, or blue. One of the more figurative screens has a bird, another a spray of banana-like leaves, but even the latter are just excuses for her experiments with greens and a few spots of red that evoke heliconias.
"I like abstract forms - that way I can create as I go along, doing whatever I feel to do without anybody to account to," she explains. "If you do a bird, they expect it to look like a bird."
You can tell as far as birds go hers are clumsy. That's not from artlessness, for the applique fishes on another screen have the graceful lines of nature. It's just that Bastien is more interested in the colours of the design. As it is they emit a cheerfulness that would vibrate throughout any room.
Others are different in tone, more browns, dark colours. "I wouldn't call them somber," she protests. "To me they're more interesting colours."
You look again and her meaning comes through. Occupying the lower register, the contrasts and combinations grow more subtle, more thoughtful.
For the intricate parts of these designs she's used an Indonesian Tjanting - a wax pen shaped like a narrow funnel with a tiny spout. "It's not an easy tool - you have to control the temperature of the wax because if it's too hot it just pours out."
Batik is the Indonesian art of creating patterns on fabric by using dye and wax. The word batik means "writing with wax". Bastien discovered it in London in the early 60s. She was studying at the Froebel Teachers College where there was a large art department. Bastien herself didn't sign up for art, but her flatmate did and out of curiosity Bastien tagged along to see what they did.
"There I saw a type of batik using flour paste instead of wax," she recalls. "Batik wasn't important there, more screen and block printing, but I was fascinated. I bought books and began to teach myself."
Bastien returned to Trinidad in 1967 to teach at St Peter's primary school in Pointe-a-Pierre and that was when she really began trying her hand at batik. In 1968 she held her first exhibition. Batik was unknown in Trinidad at the time but her work was well received. Since then she's held exhibitions in London, Washington, Oslo, Rio de Janeiro, Kingston, Nassau, Paramaribo, as well as Trinidad.
"My forte is colour, rather than design," she admits. "I like to experiment with combinations, those which you wouldn't think could go together. I find colour fascinating."
She explains that every colour changes its tone when placed next to a different colour. "If you have a yellow and you put blue next to it, it changes the tone of the yellow," she says. "But if you put red next to it you get a completely different tone."
It sounds simple, but the pervasive cosquellity of much colour combination in Trinidad - in clothing as in architecture - testifies to the rarity of a colour sensibility. One spectacular exception is Peter Minshall, whose artistry one can argue relies more heavily on the successes of his colour combinations than anything else. Who can forget, for instance, the gold and off-whites of this year's Tapestry?
Bastien's inspiration isn't from mas, though. Rather she draws from the greater profusion of colour that is nature. "Look at the hills, they have all the shades of blues, greens, purples," she says. "It's magnificent."
She points at the yellow, black and burgundy corkscrew leaves of a plant, "Try as you may you'll never get the colours of that croton," she says. "You can't copy nature, you can just get inspiration and ideas from it."
Her front porch is overflowing with large potted plants. The leaves on each one have different combinations of light and dark green, and you marvel at the infinite variety possible within such narrow limits. Outside, in the narrow yard that surrounds her Sydenham Avenue home, are the flowers.
"I had a large collection of hibiscuses - about 55 varieties. I was fascinated by them - they're most beautiful flowers and I won most of the hibiscus prizes at the horticultural show," she says with a deep sigh. "Until the mealybug appeared."
She identifies the telltale signs on the few hibiscus trees remaining, the crinkling at the base of the young leaves. So she's moved on to bougainvillea. "They're hardy, easy to grow and they flourish in the dry season," she says, perking up to point out the different colours of the flowers - the pinks, reds, oranges, purples, and whites.
Even the leaves differ between the species, some being plain green, others green and white, but it's not the beauty of their colours that surprises you now so much as the veil that's been lifted from your eyes.