Memories of the British Virgin Islands
Artist Jill Tattersall’s book, “Memories of the British Virgin Islands”, captures her impressions of the BVI through beautifully rendered watercolors that evoke the islands’ beauty, culture and traditions.
Jill sailed with her family from the UK to St. Lucia on a banana boat in 1965. They were en route to the BVI where her husband, Dr. Robin Tattersall, was taking up a position as the BVI’s general surgeon. From St. Lucia they boarded a 28-foot sailboat and made their way up the island chain. When they sailed into the BVI, Jill felt like she had reached home. “It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen,” she said.
Only newly discovered by a fledgling tourism industry, Tortola was still a frontier. The houses on Main Street abutted the harbor, there was a fruit and vegetable market where the Road Town jetty stands and many residents still traversed the island by horse and donkey. Sailing yachts, like the Tattersall’s, were a novelty in Road Harbour and elsewhere around the islands.
Each painting is accompanied by a detailed description – along with reminiscences of the story behind each work. The Bougainvillea, a medical and surgical clinic run by her husband, also served for a time as the family home. Of her painting “Climbing to the Bougainvillea”, she writes, “When I was living in the Bougainvillea in the ‘70s I took a photograph looking upward from the steep uneven steps. When I unearthed this photograph, I visualized a family toiling upwards towards the battlemented path we called ‘The Soldiers’ Walk’ on their way to see the doctor.
The sights and smells she encountered during her travels around the island are depicted in The Charcoal Seller at Meyers. “In the mid 60s I remember charcoal fires burning everywhere with that evocative smell of Africa, and every house had its coal pot in which most cooking was done.”
Jill studied painting when young, and remembers that one of her teachers, Sir Alfred Munnings who specialized in painting racehorses, “made me look at things in a different way.” But rather than continue to paint, she switched to writing because “My sister was a painter and was very good at it,” she explains. She became a writer of historical mystery romances as a young mother in 1950s England. The books were very well researched she said, and one of them, Lyonesse Abbey, made it to the New York Times best seller list.
She continued to write when she came to Tortola, and in addition to mysteries, has written several books on Caribbean history including ones on Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy and Captain Kidd. She has found though, that she prefers painting as a way of recounting her life in the islands since she can do it in a purely visual way.
“It was such a paintable place,” she explains. She took art lessons with Maryann Miller, a painter living on Tortola at the time, and sold her first painting at her gallery in Road Town. “It wasn’t until after my divorce,” that I began painting in earnest,” she says. She took some additional painting classes with Roger Burnett, well-known for his island watercolors, and joined a painting group. The painting group was a very good transition from writing, she believes. “I was inspired by its beauty and color and I could use the same structure and creativity.”
She was also inspired by the people that she met, like traditional hat maker Katherine Lettsome. Jill used to visit her in Long Look, and watch as she braided the fronds of the white teyer palm. In the book, Jill describes Katherine as, “a wonderful woman and a well-known hat maker.”
There is a treasure trove of paintings in “Memories of the British Virgin Islands”, each with a personal reminiscence and wry humor. In “Main Street Traffic”, Jill recounts: “The first traffic jam occurred in Main Street when one of the three convicts escaped from the old prison and police station, pursued by the entire force as he ran into the sea . . . naturally everyone in the vicinity turned out to watch the unfolding drama, years before we had television to entertain us.”
Jill’s book, Memories of the British Virgin Islands is available at Nutmeg on Waterfront Drive on Main Street, Road Town.
– Claudia Colli
