Minshall-Miscellany - Y Art Gallery

Redwing, Acrylic on board, 12” x 12”, ©1980

In 1966 the Carnival supplement of the
Trinidad Daily Mirror featured on its cover a
photograph of the head of a man playing a
mas. Shaven clean, the head was painted all
over with a mosaic of colours, a stained-glass
window of a head, mask-like and serene.
Peter Minshall became fascinated with this
image, and saved copies of the newspaper
for his portfolio of art references. He was
then twenty-five, about to finish his studies in
theatre design at the Central School of Art and
Design in London. Around the same time, he
was designing queen costumes and gowns for
Trinidad Jaycees Carnival Queens, fully faithful
to the island bourgeois sentiments of glamour
and cosquelle beauty. Not long after, upon
graduating from the Central, he began working
as a designer for the professional theatre, and
within three years his designs were featured in
a heralded premiere at Sadler’s Wells Theatre
in London of the full-length ballet, Beauty and
the Beast. Meanwhile, betwixt and between
the professional theatre work and the periodic
returns to the Trinidad Carnival, Minshall pulled
from his portfolio of references the head of the
carnival man and began to deploy it in graphic
design projects, and in easel paintings, as a sort
of surreal mystical Everyman. Within another
few years he had experienced, onstage at the
Queen’s Park Savannah, the breakthrough in
kinetic expression that manifested in his mas
From the Land of the Hummingbird. Clearly,
this was an artist not limited to a single art form
or means of creative expression.
Minshall is best known as an artist of the
mas. It is an identification with which he is
both comfortable and proud, but it should
not be misunderstood as a narrow focus
or a limitation. Most essentially, Minshall is a
contemporary artist. As the artist evolved,
he was drawn to the mas, fundamentally,
because he believed it held the greatest
possibilities for making contemporary art. His
body of work in the carnival has borne out that
conviction.
Given the artist’s background, training,
talent, and ambition, it is not surprising that his
design work for the mas displays sophisticated
draughtsmanship and artistry. The work of
creating mas involves drawing, sketching,
collage and construction in the making of
visual patterns and forms, and these are often
as valid and viable on the gallery wall as they
are on the streets during the carnival.
At the same time, it is equally unsurprising
that the contemporary artist continued, over
the years, to create work across numerous
other art forms and various media. The works
Black Narcissus
Design for Jaycees Carnival Queen evening gown,
Trinidad Carnival 1967
Crayon, acrylic and lace collage on card
20” x 25”
©1966
2 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 3

The Bird in the Gilded Cage
Design for Jaycee’s Carnival Queen costume
Acrylic on paper
12.75” x 19.5”
in this exhibition, MINSHALL MISCELLANY,
provide a rich sampling of that variety.
The range is wide, but the works are
not disparate. There is a complex web of
interrelatedness. To borrow from the theme
of his 1997 mas, each piece is a thread of the
overall Tapestry of the Minshall body of work.
Recurrent themes reveal themselves
across the many media and art forms: duality,
life and death, good and evil, humankind’s
glorious perfection and man’s inhumanity to
man. The quintessence of celebration and
the mad dance on the brink of oblivion. The
dramatic arc of the carnival, beginning with the
birth of jouvay, rising out of the earth, to the
fully-fledged glory of Carnival Tuesday, waning
to the lengthening shadows of las’ lap.
The theatre designs have the vitality
of the mas. Sculpture is in the form of the
transformative masque. A mural dances like a
mas in the breeze. Painting and collage deploy
the meticulous intricacy of headpiece and
breastplate. The mas is theatre of the street.
And from the surface of drawing and painting,
collage and maquette, we are caught in the
sidelong gaze of that serene and surreal man
of the carnival, our Callaloo, our Everyman.
– Todd Gulick, (11 Oct 2012)
4 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 5

Man Better Man: Potagee Joe’s Rumshop
Theatre set design
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Cut out card, tape and glue
11” x 21.5”
©1976
Beauty and the Beast, Act II: Servant Girl 1
Costume design for ballet
Scottish Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London
Acrylic on paper
9.5” x 20”
©1969
Beauty and the Beast: Bavolet, Beauty’s father
Costume design for ballet
Scottish Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London
Acrylic, metal wire on paper
10” x 22”
©1969
6 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 7

CALLALOO SAY... (Extracted from Callaloo and The Crab by Peter Minshall)
Callaloo say that man have a spirit. How that
spirit does come like a circle ‘round man
head when it uncover...
Every man have the power to put circle
‘round he head and shine like the man in the
moon. Every man have spirit. It only want to
uncover. Is so Callaloo speak.
And Callaloo say how man and beast and
bird and fish and tree and everything on this
little piece of Earth all pour from one cup...
It only have one cup, Callaloo say. All things
on this Earth, all pour from one cup. From
that one cup all does drink.
This little piece of Earth is the cup that man
does drink from. Is with care man have to
hold that cup. Is with life and love he have
to fill it. Is circle that man have to put ‘round
man head. Is love man have to love man an
is lovse man have to love this little piece of
Earth...
Just as every man here seeing every man
self in me, so I self seeing myself in every man
here. Every man here is every other man
here.
I is everyman.
You is everyman.
All of we is one.
Then Callaloo say how every man need love.
And the circle must have room for every man.
Nobody must leave out...
Take heart, he say.
Put heart in a circle, an put all the differences
it have amongst man, down to the last little
piece of difference, put all right there next to
heart in that circle, and swizzle it up good,
and then taste the sweetness of the callaloo
of man.
The differences is there to add delight, not to
destroy and divide. The callaloo of man more
sweet than the stew. Don’t let it stand up and
spoil...
Callaloo say to put away cutlass. Throw all
the ammunition in the sea. And if is love man
want, and good life man want to live, is hand
have to hold on to hand, is circle have to
make, is peace have to put in circle centre,
and is prosperity then, and happiness for
each and every man.
Is so Callaloo finish talk.
8 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 9

A Rainbow for Everyman
Ink stamp and acrylic on card, mounted on board
62.75” x 12”
©1986
10 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 11

The Coloured Man
Crayon on paper
12” x 12”
Dry Leaves of Grass
Acrylic and fern leaf on card
14” x 20”
©1986
12 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 13

Jouvay: The Rising Sun
Design for mural
Sagicor Building, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain
Acrylic on paper, cut out and collaged
10.75” x 26”
©1991
Jouvay: The Rising Sun is the design for
a mural commissioned by Barbados Mutual
insurance company, now Sagicor, for their
Port of Spain headquarters on the western
edge of the Queens Park Savannah. Minshall
approached the design for the mural the way
he would approach the design for a king mas:
start with the engineering and the structure,
which then informs the design and the
decoration.
Combining references from the art form of
mural design as well as from his own work in
the mas, Minshall conceived a mural that would
use a mosaic technique to display a detailed
image, but a mosaic that would be light and
alive, dancing like a mas, not cemented into
place. Unlike ceramic tile mosaic, these “tiles”
would be one-inch squares of translucent
plastic (the coloured “gel” film used in theatrical
lighting), dangling from plastic fasteners
(“shot” on with fastener “guns,” used to fasten
tags onto clothing). These tiles would hang
from a grid of vertical tapes stretched taught
the entire fifty-two foot height of the building’s
atrium. (The related piece in this exhibition,
Dancing Mosaic Hummingbird, is a mock-up
of the construction technique for the mural.)
To create the design artwork, Minshall
went through a painstaking process of
creating his own range of coloured paper for
collage. Since the image was to be executed
inch by inch, in an array of individual “tiles,”
he deployed a paint-splatter technique using
stiff-bristled toothbrushes to create washes
of colour comprised of tiny dots of paint, each
dot to represent a mosaic square. From this
stock of pointillist colours he meticulously cut
out and collaged the three hummingbirds,
bougainvillea, hibiscus, and foliage, each
edged in gold, applied against a joyful palette
of sunrise. With these techniques, the artist
packed an extraordinary amount of precise
detail into the 11” x 26” artwork. The completed
mural, installed in the building’s atrium, features
over 140,000 squares of coloured film, each
corresponding to a tiny dot of paint in the
original artwork.
The mural remains in place today,
remarkably as fresh as the day it was finished
in early 1992. It faces the rising sun in the east.
As air currents pass over the surface of the
mural, the hanging mosaic tiles rustle gently,
giving the mural image a continual shimmer
and dance.
Dancing Mosaic Hummingbird
Study for mural design: “Jouvay: The Rising Sun”
Polyester plastic film, plastic fasteners, cloth tape
36” x 36”
©1991
14 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 15

Minshall painted the collection of The Cloths of Tantana while at residence at the Yaddo artist’s
retreat in upstate New York in 1993. These are artworks for gallery display, by which Minshall
converted so-called street art into so-called fine art. They are paintings in acrylic on paper that
re-present graphic designs the artist had created in 1990 for the masband Tantana. For that
mas, the designs were made into seven-foot squares of appliqued cloth and given to each
masplayer as part of the mas costume. Following are excerpts from statements posted in the
mascamp and in the newspapers to help convey to the masplayers and the public the essence
of the mas.
TANTANA
TANTANA is Caribbean excitement.
TANTANA is that particular West
Indian joi de vivre – saucy,
exuberant, spirited, sharp, witty,
sweet, stylish, and sexy.
TANTANA derives, probably, from the
French “tant”, meaning “enough” or
“so much”; “tant-tant” is
“so much – so much”, or “much of a
muchness”.
TANTANA is a Caribbean flavour of
excess – an excess of the human spirit.
TANTANA is the synthesis, the hybrid.
It is not European, nor African,
nor Indian, nor Syrian, nor Chinese,
nor anything else but CARIBBEAN.
TANTANA gives each masplayer a piece
of cloth,
a seven-foot square of tailored, appliquéd,
contemporary design.
Each square of cloth is a work of art in itself.
The masplayer plays the square of cloth.
It is the flag without the flagpole.
It is the wing without the cane.
It is the cape, the skirt, before they are
tailored.
It can be a billowing banner overhead, or a
wall of colour.
TANTANA is an expression of faith
in the creative spirit of each individual
masplayer.
The mas is what you make it.
The Cloths of Tantana: Fyzabad
Acrylic on paper
24” x 24”
©1993
The Cloths of Tantana: Black Rock
Acrylic on paper
24” x 24”
©1993
16 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 17

Head Piece
Acrylic and crayon on card
20” x 30”
©1986
Angel Astronaut
Acrylic on transparent vacuum-moulded PVC plastic
29” x 29” (on board)
©1987
18 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY MINSHALL MISCELLANY I 19

20 I MINSHALL MISCELLANY
Face Off (the artist sober and the artist drunk)
Crayon on Paper
28” x 24”