Minshall-Miscellany - Y Art Gallery

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
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