Kali­fa Clyne

The slash­ing of art­work on the perime­ter wall of the Queen's Park Oval in Port-of-Spain dis­cov­ered on Mon­day, is the worst dam­age done to the Peo­ple's Can­vas art project since it be­gan in 2008. This is the opin­ion of Queen's Park Crick­et Club (QPCC) CEO Richard Mows­er.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day with the T&T?Guardian, Mows­er said 12 of the 14 paint­ings on the Tra­garete Road wall of the Oval had been slashed in what he de­scribed as an act of "pure van­dal­ism." The prints are re­pro­duc­tions of the work of lo­cal artists and pho­tog­ra­phers. He said none on the oth­er walls, in­clud­ing the crick­et pic­tures on Eliz­a­beth Street, had been dam­aged.

"We have in­stances where we have need­ed to re­place paint­ings be­fore, but not to this ex­tent," Mows­er said. He said QPCC was look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways to pro­tect the art­work in the fu­ture. "The paint­ings are cloth over a frame and we are look­ing at ei­ther mount­ing them over some­thing stur­dier or putting some­thing in front of them to pro­tect them," Mows­er said.

He said, "It looked like some­body just walked past with a knife and out of bad mind, cut them." Mows­er said the plan was to have the pic­tures re­placed.