On colour as nostalgia — and why I still paint home.

The Saint Lucian light does not simply stay in Saint Lucia. It comes north with you, in some stubborn part of your memory, and it waits. You unpack. You find an apartment. You learn how long Canadian winters actually are. And then, one afternoon in late October, you mix a colour on the palette — an orange that is almost a pink, a pink that is almost a red — and you realise you have just painted the light on the tin roofs of Castries at four in the afternoon. You did not mean to. You could not have helped it.

This essay is about that. About how the colour you grew up inside does not leave you. About why I have stopped apologising for painting Saint Lucia from Oshawa, Ontario. And about what I am bringing with me to Saint Lucia next month, for Life in Colour.

The light followed me.

In Saint Lucia, colour is not a choice. It is a condition. The sea is turquoise for a reason, the mango is mango-coloured for a reason, and the red of a flame tree in full bloom is not a red you would choose — it is a red you would not believe if someone described it to you before you saw it. You grow up inside this, and you do not know that it is unusual, because you have nothing to compare it to.

Then you move to Canada as an adult, and the palette quiets. Not because Canada is grey — it isn’t, not really — but because the saturations are simply set lower. Winters turn everything a quiet, beautiful taupe for five months of the year. I respect that palette. I have painted in it. But I did not grow up inside it, and when I try to paint only from it, something in the work goes polite in a way I do not recognise.

Colour has traditionally been a dominant part of our lives.

That is a sentence I gave to The Blue Mountain Review in 2024 and did not think very hard about at the time. I think about it now. It is the truest thing I have said about what I do.

What the Symphony Series is actually about.

In 2016, I debuted the Symphony Series at the Arts Village of the Saint Lucia Jazz and Arts Festival in Castries. Every painting in the series depicts a man and a woman, unified by a string instrument — a guitar, a cello, a violin, occasionally something in the same family. In some of the paintings, there is also a child, and the composition bends slightly into a womb-shape. The three beings are never joined the same way.

People often ask what the series is about. It is not, really, about music. Music is the occasion. The series is about the grammar of unity — how two people hold each other when a third thing (a cello, a child, a shared memory) becomes the centre of the geometry. The cello is a body that sounds. The man and the woman are bodies that listen. The child, when there is a child, is the body that will remember all of this.

The Saint Lucian poet John Robert Lee found the series on Facebook in 2016 — Facebook, of all places — and wrote a long sequence of poems in response. We published them together as Song & Symphony with Mahanaim Publishing that same year. The St. Lucia Star called the book “a rhythmic experience — painting and poetry as one orchestral performance.” I still keep my copy on the shelf beside the window, where the cover catches the north light in the mornings.

The three beings are never joined the same way.

Ink versus acrylic versus the screen.

I do not work in one medium because I do not live in one feeling. Acrylic is my primary — it holds the Caribbean saturations without dulling them, and it dries fast enough to keep up with how I think. Ink is for the quieter work, the line-and-pattern pieces I have been making since long before the Symphony paintings. Mixed media is for the pieces that refuse to decide. And digital is where I have been widening over the last few years, because it lets me format a painting as a print, or onto fabric, or onto a scarf someone can wear, and suddenly the work walks out of the studio in a way canvas never could.

Three truths I have come to, about working in more than one medium:

• A medium is not a style. It is a speed.
• You cannot cheat a medium. If you try to make acrylic behave like watercolour, acrylic will let you, and then the work will quietly disown you.
• The best way to understand a medium you love is to spend a month inside one you do not.

Life in Colour, and what I’m bringing to Saint Lucia this April.

From April 27 to May 16, I will be exhibiting alongside Alwyn St. Omer, Nancy Cole, John Phulchere, and Cecil Fevrier in Life in Colour — a group show across the Audi Showroom in Choc and Orange Grove Plaza in Bois D’Orange. It will be the first time a new body of my work goes back to Saint Lucia in this form. I am bringing three paintings from the Symphony Series, two Pattern Study ink drawings, and one new mixed-media piece I have only just finished naming.

I am nervous about it, the way you are nervous before you bring someone you love home to meet the family. I made this work in Oshawa, in a studio with a view of maple trees. I did not make it to impress anyone. But Saint Lucia is the place the work is about, and a painting always finds out something about itself when it goes home.

If you are in Saint Lucia in late April, come see it. And if you are reading this from somewhere colder, know that the work is mostly for you, too — for anyone who carries a colour they did not choose, and has not yet decided to stop.