Half-way to Heaven
When I was young
I wanted to paint Paradise.
Still do.
Who’d have thought I’d discover
a road veiled in cloud,
half-way to heaven along the North Coast,
winding between viridian mountains,
a glimpse of balisier red as a woman’s lips
and the wild sea below.
The earth turns, tides ebb and flow,
flowers bloom, birds sing,
a mango slowly ripens in the sun.
These are the paradise-poems of the world
glimpsed now and then through a door left ajar,
in little rock pools brimming with stars.
– Sarah Beckett
By JANELLE DE SOUZA
THE title of Sarah Beckett’s newest exhibition, Half-way to Heaven, conjures the idea of many things – human mortality, spirituality, a journey, goals – but in addition to that, the collection is a testament that there is still much beauty in the world despite all the negatives.
Half-way to Heaven grew out of her 2024 show Iere: Living in the Land of the Humming Bird, which included her then newly published book of poetry of the same name and a collection of paintings.
“I was doing a new series of poetry continuing from that series, and I wrote this poem. Halfway through, one of the lines is, ‘Who’d have thought I’d discover a road veiled in cloud half-way to heaven along the North Coast.’ And it kind of set me off in a direction.
“And then, coupled with the fact that my health isn’t very good and I can’t manage huge paintings anymore, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to experiment working much smaller,’ and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.”
[caption id="attachment_1156915" align="alignnone" width="927"] Artist Sarah Beckett mixes paint at her studio on May 14.[/caption]
Mostly small pieces with a few larger works, in Half-way to Heaven Beckett uses the image of the butterfly because, across all cultures, it symbolises transformation. She said in some cultures the butterfly was a guardian or messenger carrying messages from the living to the spirit world.
The word for butterfly in formal Greek is psyche, which also means soul. The Greek goddess, Psyche, was the goddess of the soul and was depicted as a butterfly, or as a young woman with butterfly’s wings.
The use of butterflies, liberal amounts of gold leaf and her usual ethereal aesthetic gives the feeling of a fantasy world, where one could imagine a fairy would choose to live.
Beckett said the collection of 18-20 paintings is based on the feeling of a place rather than an actual location, and will include a series of eight to ten poems which relate to the works. She said it is within the genre of what she has been doing over the last two years, with layers of red, yellow, blue and green oil paints building up to help give the paintings luminosity.
Speaking to Newsday at her studio in Cascade, Port of Spain, earlier this month she said artists see the world in certain ways, through different windows, and so do different styles of work, which are all fine as long as the artists stay true to their vision. She said when they decide what to paint or sc
