BC Pires

My name is Che Lovelace and I'm an oil painter.My "pass­port" name is Cheikh Sedar Lovelace. Ap­par­ent­ly, in 1969, the An­gli­can Church would not al­low me to be chris­tened Che. My par­ents made my first name Cheikh af­ter the African his­to­ri­an-philoso­pher, Cheikh An­ta Diop. I be­lieve Sedar is af­ter the Sene­galese po­et L&ea­cute;opold S&ea­cute;dar Sen­g­hor. Why they set me up to live up to the stan­dard of such great men, I couldn't tell you.We lived about two miles out­side of the main vil­lage, so it was like coun­try life with­in coun­try life. I be­lieve I played a douen in one of the plays pro­duced for the Best Vil­lage com­pe­ti­tion.I al­ways re­mem­ber the plac­ards that would go up on the lamp-poles when peo­ple knew a gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial was mak­ing a trip along that To­co Main Road: "WE WANT LIGHTS." Every elec­tion the can­di­dates would say "Lights com­ing." But for the en­tire time we lived there, the lights nev­er came.

TV was a lit­tle pop-up black-and-white, eight inch­es square, with D-size bat­ter­ies. Thank­ful­ly, [el­der broth­er] Walt, al­ways an elec­tron­ics man, man­aged to make the TV work with a car bat­tery. Some­times it would conk out in the mid­dle of Dif­fer­ent Strokes. The on­ly way to charge it would be to take that heavy bat­tery down the hill to where the car was parked, start the car, then re­place the good car bat­tery with the dead one, and leave the car idling for a while to charge it. It was plen­ty dra­ma.

The oth­er re­al­ly mem­o­rable as­pect of child­hood in Matu­ra was so many writ­ers, artists, ac­tors and mu­si­cians: Er­rol Jones, Hugh Robert­son (di­rec­tor of Bim), Derek Wal­cott, Shi­va Naipaul, Raoul Pan­tin, Wilbert Hold­er, Lawrence Scott. CLR James spent some days with us. He lay in the ham­mock and re­count­ed sto­ries. Many Sun­days were filled with these vis­i­tors talk­ing about ideas and the world as I played un­der ta­bles; it all sound­ed grand and im­por­tant; and it prob­a­bly was.The mag­ic start­ed to fade. I be­gan to trav­el by taxi every morn­ing to get to QRC, wak­ing at 4 am; my par­ents were break­ing up. In adult life, I set up a stu­dio at a place my moth­er owns in Matu­ra (dif­fer­ent to where we grew up) and worked there for a cou­ple years. I am very close to my moth­er.

Be­ing my fa­ther's son has not made any­thing eas­i­er in my own life. Nor should it. If any­thing, peo­ple ap­praise you by high­er stan­dards. In the end, one has to carve one's own path.

I have a son but live singly. From day one I tried not to make a neg­a­tive of the fact that his moth­er and my­self are not "to­geth­er." We work to­geth­er to give him plen­ty love and guid­ance. I hope that nev­er changes.Now I'm a bit old­er, I find my­self drink­ing less, and hard­ly ever hard al­co­hol. I like my beers though, and for the most part, it is all that is nec­es­sary for a nice buzz..Tri­nis too of­ten use our Trinida­di­an-ness to shield us from the world. We set our stan­dards lo­cal­ly. We must dare to do great things while stay­ing right here in these is­lands.

Around fourth form, my teacher was Jack­ie Hink­son. I was re­al­ly tak­en by the Span­ish Re­nais­sance painter El Gre­co, his ex­pres­sive elon­gat­ed fig­ures, and the moody somber can­vas­es of the Nor­we­gian, Ed­vard Munch [and] Leroy Clarke's Douens. With this new ex­po­sure to West­ern art in Hink­son's class, I was able to put it in­to a con­text to some de­gree. Even though I did not end up paint­ing in that par­tic­u­lar aes­thet­ic, Leroy has al­ways epit­o­mised the jour­ney of the artist here.

Most of the time, when I have an idea I feel may work for a paint­ing, I make a small draw­ing in my note­book, maybe with a few notes, so I can re­mem­ber the idea in some de­tail. Some­times I be­gin with no pre­con­ceived idea, I just freestyle it straight from my head and see where it leads.

One of the trick­i­est things is to fig­ure out when to leave a paint­ing alone. I usu­al­ly try to leave it once I feel there is a qual­i­ty in the im­age that makes me want to keep look­ing at it. Some­times paint­ings may look fin­ished but, in fact, they hold no mys­tery. For it to be con­sid­ered fin­ished, there has to be an as­pect of the paint­ing that can­not quite be grasped, some­thing you can't quite put your fin­ger on, but some­thing you are hap­py to keep search­ing for while look­ing at the paint­ing. Many times, I wish I'd put on an­oth­er stroke. At oth­er times, I've tak­en paint­ings way too far.

Usu­al­ly I get to the stu­dio by mid-morn­ing, work till about 4pm. Then I go spend time with my son. I re­turn to the stu­dio at about 8 pm and work un­til mid­night or 1 am. If I feel I'm on a roll, I'll stay lat­er-and pay the price next morn­ing. I can some­times get five or six hours work done at this time with­out dis­trac­tion.

I don't own an easel.

I main­tain a dai­ly prac­tice of paint­ing. I do pre­fer to paint when I am in the mood, but I don't think I can af­ford such a lux­u­ry at this point. So if I do not feel like paint­ing, the best way to in­duce the mood is to pick up old un­re­solved pieces and just start putting paint on them.