In My Irie Heart - Roberta Stoddart

I gave you a gift and look what you have done with it

God’s Bride at the Softbox gallery in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 2006

Last year, Roberta Stoddart invited the bookman and Adele to her studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad. She had drawing tables set up for her classes and towards the back there were a few small paintings of dogs and fowls reproduced from photographs. Stoddart has a fondness for dogs and in one of her pieces, she paints them fucking.

In Jamaican circles, Roberta Stoddart is regarded as her country's finest painter. At the exhibition, a suitable distance, she showed works from her personal collection including God’s Bride (1996, 48ins x 96ins) a painting with the refinement of a Flemish master, but also a work with an allegorical meaning towards an unwed woman and forgotten children.

God’s Bride shows Stoddart's ability as a fine art painter, the subject however has a lesser appeal as it deals with an unconformable issue. The painting expresses her internal torment subjected by social obligations and to the destructive force which it illustrates; West Indian, Jamaica, Church, Blacks, Sex, Marriage and Death. One particularly drawback is her tendency to be paint flat and to construe the perspective to squeeze in every element.

At Stoddart's exhibition at CCA7 a few years ago, she focused on the homeless, and painted vagrants as large canvases. The subjects were characteristic of their circumstances and the painter intensified parts of their unkempt body to amplify the social neglect placed on them.

..........................................................................................................................................................................

This is quite daring for a white West Indian, she has run up against people demanding to know why she has chosen to paint 'black people' as though it is out of bounds. As stated before, Roberta Stoddart is painting from a personal space,and searching out meanings from her subjects. As with her smaller works of angels who look caught up in spun sugar, there is both a sweetness and a macabre nature to the images that are pricked with a fine needle, a drop of blood escaping their hearts, as though Ms. Stoddart empathizes with all the travails of being black in a white world. She has an innate understanding of the outsider, so who else could put this across, but one who can feel what being outside feels like? This is obviously beyond colour barriers. Her work's depth come from technique as well as experiences, and pushing past her own comfort zones to make sense of her world. - Adele

At Softbox gallery in Port of Spain, Trinidad.