Savouring memo
Nicole Bissoo-Williams, painter and ceramist, goes back in time to savour memories through art.
The semi-abstract and realism artist portrays her work mostly using oil and acrylics and dabbles a bit in watercolours but regardless of what she uses the end product takes you down her memory lane.
Nicole, a former art stream student of St Stanislaus, said her passion for art stemmed from watching her father, late artist Patrick Bissoo, as he worked. In fact, according to her, she started drawing before she learnt to write.
“As a child I would paint on my father’s paintings…thinking he didn’t notice and I kept on doing it…. only to find out he left his paint out so I could actually doodle,” she told The Scene recently.
While at school, Nicole was aspiring to be a designer but her then art teacher Shirley Benjamin saw how good she was at art and was the one who planted the idea of Nicole attending Burrowes School of Art after secondary school.
“So I went home and told my dad and he said that’d be very easy to do because many of his friends were instructors there,” she recalled.
And so it came to be that after writing the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams at 15, she joined Burrowes. But the idea of becoming a designer was never fully dissolved and she eventually did a few pieces including a wedding dress. In the end, however, she came back to painting. For her, designing could never give the same peace of mind that comes with painting.
“I’m always painting and people are always asking so I stuck at painting. Painting is like therapy. I’m inspired by watching my children; the things they do like climbing the fence. I’m inspired by sceneries as well. When I’m depressed sort of, [it] gives me more vigour in getting my work done,” the artist said smiling at the last mentioned unlikely inspiration.
Other inspirations were her past art teachers, Shirley and George Simon (former Burrowes instructors).
Today, art for Nicole has moved beyond inspiration to become more of therapy for her, as she mentioned earlier. It is a medium through which she releases her anger and all that is silent within her, like her mother’s strength.
“My dad left our home when I was at an early age and my mother had five children to take care of. I used to vent my anger in my paintings which mostly featured mothers and children. As I grew up I bettered them and they were all sold to mothers and other people who related to them. My mother is a stallion; I’ve learnt to be strong because of the example she’s been,” she proudly said.
Though it was not easy, Nicole’s passion for art drove her to be innovative with whatever materials she had. “Though I had a rough childhood, I had a happy one with my mom and my siblings. Because we learned early how to be in resources I had available to m pointers tied together, then tap the pointers to get it soft and used real burnt wood as charc eye pencil to create black and and sold them. I used the mo art school,” the artist said.
Today, Nicole paints for c around the world, some of wh done work for persons like G