Sean Nero

There's a rea­son why Lisa Sar­jeant comes alive when talk­ing about fab­ric: she knows it in­ti­mate­ly, hav­ing worked with fab­ric as an artist for two decades. The talk ra­dio per­son­al­i­ty, whose hand-paint­ed scarves were pre­sent­ed to the world lead­ers and their spous­es as gifts for the Fifth Sum­mit of the Amer­i­c­as in Port-of-Spain two years ago, Sar­jeant still gets a rush when she starts work­ing on a de­sign af­ter all these years. "I don't think I can put in­to words the ex­cite­ment I get when I get new fab­ric. "I love see­ing what hap­pens when dye is up­on fab­ric and what I can do with it. That brings a huge rush to me," she said. "I'm al­ways try­ing some­thing new with fab­ric. I get these 'ah ha' mo­ments and I think, okay, great, let me try this. I try to mix colours in a way I've nev­er done be­fore. God knows I must have com­bined every colour there is pos­si­ble."

Hard to be­lieve that there was a time when Sar­jeant's zeal for her craft was put on a shelf due to some crush­ing life changes. The death of her son dur­ing birth, a failed mar­riage and the feel­ing of be­ing smoth­ered in jobs all con­tributed to her with­draw­al from her craft. Slow­ly she start­ed back paint­ing, on­ly to re­alise that it was help­ing with her heal­ing. Sar­jeant thought the tim­ing was per­fect to for­mal­ly make a re­turn when not­ed fash­ion de­sign­er Meil­ing phoned her to find out if she still did fab­ric paint­ing. Meil­ing, she said, was sur­prised to find out that she was cre­at­ing but that she was al­so hoard­ing her pieces. Meil­ing took the fin­ished work and in­cor­po­rat­ed it in­to her de­sign, much to Sar­jeant's de­light. "I'm al­ways amazed to see what she does with it. Many times I would do a piece of fab­ric and I'm clue­less as to the plan. When she (Meil­ing) has her show and I see it on the run­way, I'm in awe. She'd put to­geth­er two pieces of fab­ric that I prob­a­bly would have nev­er thought of putting to­geth­er."

Sar­jeant val­ues their arrange­ment: Meil­ing nev­er dic­tates to her; rather, she just em­braces her work.

"I get my cred­i­bil­i­ty where my fab­ric is con­cerned. I haven't worked with an­oth­er de­sign­er, quite de­lib­er­ate­ly. I en­joy our work re­la­tion­ship. That is very im­por­tant in your cre­ativ­i­ty. "I'm not good with peo­ple telling me what to do in any as­pect in life," Sar­jeant con­fessed, laugh­ing. With the seem­ing resur­gence of a well-con­sti­tut­ed lo­cal fash­ion in­dus­try and with suit­case traders in full bloom, Sar­jeant can't help but feel "spe­cial." "Peo­ple have to ac­tu­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ate what I do to come to me be­cause they can go to a store in the mall and just buy what's on the rack. "It al­ways feels good when I go out and see some­one wear­ing my fab­ric. My work is not in vain and it's not just me who like it."

She's grate­ful for the knowl­edge ob­tained dur­ing her sec­ondary and ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion days at St Fran­cois Girls' Col­lege and John Don­ald­son Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute, re­spec­tive­ly. She al­so sang the prais­es of her teach­ers Mary Gill, Althea Bastien and Greer Jones for im­part­ing their knowl­edge to her. Sar­jeant, who used to watch her fa­ther paint as a child, is see­ing an­oth­er gen­er­a­tion of painters on the hori­zon. Her daugh­ter Amaya, just as she used to years be­fore her, of­ten mim­ics her as she paints."I nev­er, for a sec­ond, doubt­ed that I could make it as an artist. I'm not afraid to be pas­sion­ate about what I do. Some­times, I'm over­ly pas­sion­ate. We don't know how long we have on this earth, so I will dic­tate my path. If I can make some­one smile, then I smile. Then I'm on the right path."