What sets Saint apart is his attention to the intimate moments of working-class people, with a quiet, familiar tone that reflects the honesty of Bahamian island life.
Sheldon Saint is one of those rare painters that contemplates his pieces like a poet considers words: he searches for inspiration in the gentle landscape around him, notes when the light is just right, and waits for the right frame to capture in his work. Painting for over 30 years, Saint presents a snapshot of his works organised to mirror a walk through the islands and presents his subjects in the middle of everyday tasks. A Small Place is named after poet-essayist Jamaica Kincaid’s essayof the same name, which discusses the contrast between the visitor’s gaze and local experience—something we see in the way Saint’s pieces sit against the canon of genre paintings rendered by visiting painters that influenced our visual art history. Saint’s gaze reflects his intimate perspective of the islands as he travels through Grand Bahama, Harbour Island, Exuma, and New Providence. A sensitive hand, his oil and watercolor paintings capture the simplicity of island life as both the observer and the observed—a specificity that can only be achieved by living among the island he renders.
Saint’s paintings fall in the scope of genre painting, a form of painting that renders scenes of everyday life through realism. What sets Saint apart is his attention to the intimate moments of working-class people, with a quiet, familiar tone that reflects the honesty of Bahamian island life. The terminology in visual art to describe this observation of the everyday is voyeurism. One of the most famous genre painters, Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), implied this voyeurism by the way he framed his subjects: through curtains, a door, or a window from the other room, not so close as to look at the subject head on. In Saint’s paintings, this separation is also highlighted; the viewer often feels like they are approaching from a distance, and the subject is framed by the environment in a way that separates the viewer from direct interaction. The audience too becomes a spy, a voyeur. Take for instance By the Water’s Edge (2025): the fish stand serves as the frame that puts distance between the viewer and subjects, who are turned away from the audience, engrossed in the task they are performing. The two men seem as if they are unaware of the painter’s presence, and the audience is then positioned as a voyeur to the moment, watching them privately interact at the edge of the shore.
Saint has stated that he searches for his subjects by exploring the islands, becoming voyeur himself—looking for inspiration among his peers and often asking them to take a photo or stopping to paint en plain air when he feels moved by a particular scene. Because of this, his work captures the nuanced intimacies between artist, muse, and audience, surfacing the tension of being both an artist “observing” for inspiration, and a local being observed as one not separate from the landscape. Saint is acutely aware of how his subjects can be perceived by travelling artists and thus creates more empathetic settings that humanises them. He often reflects this soft gaze through the gentle light of the composition—another genre painting technique—a feature that also serves to indicate a specific time of day and creates more context to the story of the work. Throughout the exhibition, you will notice the soft light of balmy mornings and warm afternoons as Saint engrosses his subjects in this gentle radiance, romanticising the laborious tasks and amplifying the love of their labour.
The distinction between the marginal and central perspectives on Caribbean aesthetics is one of the most discussed topics in Caribbean art and cultural theory and is amplified here in Saint’s painting approach. Art historian Krista Thompson, PhD, provides contextual history in An Eye For the Tropics arguing that the visual language created for the Caribbean landscape was largely due to the beginnings of tourism advertising in the British West Indies. “Starting in the 1880s,” she writes, “British colonial administrators, local white elites, and American and British hoteliers in Jamaica and the Bahamas embarked on campaigns to refashion the islands as picturesque ‘tropical’ paradises, the first concerted efforts of their kind in Britain’s Caribbean colonies.”1 This tropical framing made it attractive for many travelling artists to travel to the islands and capture the picturesque often at the expense of erasing the true conditions of the majority black population, further dehumaniding them as a part of the landscape and absolving the government of responsibility to develop urban areas
American artists like Hildegarde Hamilton (1898–1970), for instance, often painted landscapes en plein air and captured a lot of street scenes around Nassau. As a divorced single woman traveling through the Caribbean as a painter, Hamilton’s practice was beyond her timeshe often spent summers in Nassau starting in 1946 and continued to travel throughout North and South America, painting and exhibiting. The sensibility that Hamilton crafted as a painter was shared throughout the different landscapes she encountered and found beauty in. Hamilton’s vocabulary of idealism and the picturesque was informed by a multitude of spaces, but it cannot compare to Saint’s vocabulary as a master who paints from a sense of knowing and camaraderie.
This recentering is the main thesis of Kincaid’s A Small Place. The essay is seminal in critiquing the visual language of colonialism by juxtaposing Kinkaid’s own memory of her Caribbean home against the viewpoint of the visitor-tourist. “The Antigua I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up,” she writes, “is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now”.2 As a response to the gaze of the outsider, the essay begins with a guided tour of Antigua—providing the reader with more nuanced information about the landscape that a tourist would not know or understand, much like what Saint achieves with his paintings. As Kincaid’s narrator walks through the streets of Antiqua, she reports on the particularities of Japanese cars on the island, or how the locals feel about the doctors in the town hospital. Saint uses the same technique in his paintings; his poetic renderings provide a subtlety that an outsider simply cannot access. This specificity upturns narratives of the picturesque, as the people within his compositions interact with the environment around them with confidence, as rulers of the land, rather than serve as props for visual emphasis of Bahamian native imagery.
In some instances, Saint composes a piece that draws on his own memory like Kincaid does in her essay, and the scenes that emerge from this technique accentuate the mundanity of daily island life. This can be seen in paintings like A Moment Remembered (2025), where Sheldon presents a scene of two boys playing marbles, or the two boys throwing their catch in A Day’s Work (2010). In each of these paintings, the composition is not punctuated by a lush landscape, but rather, the action of the subjects, as Saint positions each pair of boys in front of a bare setting. Both tasks are ones that can be seen on an everyday walk near any dock or in any neighbourhood and are easy for anyone who lives in the community to recall. Highlighting the mundane is also a key characteristic of genre painting, and this method functions differently in the Caribbean context, as it serves to demystify the paradise narrative that exists in the colonial imagination. In A Small Place, Kincaid’s street tour points out this banality; revealing a perspective that is perhaps a blind spot that travel guides often miss in their imaging of the island space.
This deconstruction happens naturally when local artists record their daily life in their work. As Saint paints his community, he upturns ideas of an island that is free to be traversed uninterrupted by the whims of locals with nothing to do. LikeKincaid, his paintings take the viewer on a small tour of the mundane with a subtle eye that can only be described as poetic. The Bahamas, when narrowed down to the specificities of individual islands are filled with “small places”, where the experience of the people are ordinary and…untropical, so to speak, as they participate in banal chores like as hair braiding, yard work, or cleaning crab. As we look through the paintings in this exhibition, we feel as if we are intruding on the privacy of the locals as they complete these everyday tasks, glancing at an intimate scene just moments before we are caught.
- Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 4.
- Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 23.