SYBIL ATTECK
An Appreciation- By Carlyle Chang

“Some things we understand; others we don't, but we must live with both”. Scribbled across one of her numerous sketches, a vendor asleep, the pencilled observation provides a succinct summation of the career of Sybil Atteck. Born early in this century, she was a product of that peculiar society, in Trinidad, when the accomplished gentlewoman sang, danced, entertained, played the piano, embroidered, spoke French, played tennis and was a witty conversationalist. At the same time it was a society which enjoyed the latest continental innovations in every facet of living — automobiles, motorcycles, flappers, silk stockings, and if daring, beach pyjammers, the charleston, jazz and Art Nouveau.

Sybil came from a family of considerable accomplishment in the acceptable sense, which apart from the usual graces permitted its daughters to be educated, to work in offices and to paint. A family so large it formed its own orchestra, so that the daily round was embellished with elegant musical soirees, much as they did in the drawingrooms of London, Paris or Park Avenue, but also for centuries past as in Goa, in Bengal or in China.

Sybil's career spans that most critical formative half century which saw, in our country, the first tentative movement towards the development of a creative community, in 1930; its virtual self immolation in social disgrace, in 1938; the watershed Guardian Exhibition of 1939; and in 1943, the establishment of the Trinidad Art Society which she helped to found. She was already at that time a very proficient artist engaged in making scientific drawings and watercolour renderings of our insect life and flora for the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. The necessity for accurate detail seen through the microscope and the equally exact rendering in that most difficult medium of watercolour was to pervade the entire output of her future years.

Other major experiences contributed to her thinking and so to her work. An extended visit to Peru where the stunning heritage of Inca pottery awakened her to the beauty of clay as a plastic medium; but also to the native observation, elegant, stylised and precise, art as record, parody or social comment. The other was her studies in America under the German expressionist Max Beckmann, part of that vast concourse of European creators and thinkers fleeing the holocaust, who became the energising force and backbone of the American thrust.

These experiences together with her studies of Cezanne's composition and theory, opened up for her, as it did for every serious painter since, a redefinition of technique but also an appreciation of expressionism as the ultimate creative tool. Imitation of the visual world was no longer an end in itself and Art encompassed the ability to express the most profound human experience, including abstract thought.

Sybil's first solo exhibition at the Trinidad Public Library in 1949 on her return from America was devastatingly criticised by the accepted critic of the day who mercilessly chastised her as being un-Trinidadian — a circumstance which repeats itself occasionally as in 1956, and recently in 1984, by those whose egocentric abuse of press privilege often creates a lifetime of irremediable distress. It was many years before she permitted herself the luxury of another solo exhibition, preferring to exhibit abroad, as in the Royal Academy, London, becoming the first native artist to do so.

In the mid-fifties she was drawn into the sweeping nationalism which accompanied the move towards West Indian Federation, and later to Trinidad and Tobago Independence. Led by Professor Dan Crowley and later, Andrew Pearse; by Andrew Carr another Art Society founding member, and by Beryl McBurnie charged with the motivation to use Dance as a galvanizing force, the intellectual community such as it was moved to patronise, to record and to interpret the native culture, establishing its validity and consolidating its central role in engendering a sense of nationalism.

Sybil's participation, nightly sketching in the gayelles, in the arenas of Bele, bongo and Shango, and inevitably in the marketplaces, home of the tired peasant, produced in her painting an essentially creole vocabulary; a drawing shorthand in which the peculiar gesture of the people was succinctly recorded with an economy of line. She created, in fact, a personal vernacular, in the painter's idiom. Some of the grotesqueries evident in her work record her concern with what is uniquely ours; our West Indian body language.

Not for her the languid grace of noble savage which her critics had and continue to promote. And one of her most potent expressions has been the figure of the dancer resting, which she executed in local clay, a la Peruvienne, and hich occurs in some of her most important paintings, such as her Belair Dancers commissioned for the Central Bank collection.

The culmination of these preoccupations appear in the two large terra-cotta friezes in the Trinidad Hilton, but echoes of them appear in the Belair Hotel mural and paintings of the sixties.

Later she was to reassess her commitments, particularly under the growing advance of Abstract-expressionism, which she appears not to have understood. Nonetheless she developed a different compositional approach, more geometric but with less acidic colour, and less concern with the human form except as didactic expressions of other ideas, such as in her carnival and hosein paintings.

Throughout her career Sybil devoted considerable time and energy to firmly establishing the Trinidad Art Society. She had been its first secretary and twenty years later its President and Honorary Life Member. In many ways a simple person, she was oblivious to the political currents which surrounding her and to which she became an unwitting tool. At this short space it is still difficult to fully assess her work although outlines of her influence are still discernible, in Chang, Chen, Nina, Minshall Sr. among others. Most important she helped to surmount insular barriers and remains a pivotal person in our brief creative history.

But Art is long and Life is short; and some things we understand, and others we don't, but we must live with both.