Out in the wilds of Terres Basses on a rambling property, the temptation is to sit and marvel at nature - but that’s just me, a journalist visiting from the hustle and bustle of Simpson Bay. The woman I’m here to talk to has work to do, and the evidence is all around us.
We’re at Noco Art Villa, which doubles as studio and gallery for the artist Norma Trimborn.
This hillside domain is a world away from Norma’s home town of Duisburg, an industrial town and inland port near Düsseldorf in Germany. She arrived here 17 years ago via China and New York.
“I left New York because I wanted an easier lifestyle,” she says. “And I chose St Maarten because it’s very international, a diverse society.”
Norma only became an artist in her 30s, but then “It took over my life. I reduced my daytime job to four days a week, then three days, and more and more I started to show my work. New York is a difficult place to be an artist; it’s very busy and money-oriented – and crowded. So here I had a better opportunity. And a year or two later my sister, Corinna, joined me here from Germany.”
Corinna is also an artist, although the sisters’ styles and fields of activity are very different. Norma is an abstract artist, working in oils.
“Oil is a very forgiving medium,” she explains. “And it has body, so you can use it in a heavier way or a lighter way. It’s more flexible than acrylic or watercolor, for example.”
I suggest that, although she started relatively late, she must have been good at art at in her youth.
“Not particularly,” she says. “What made we want to be an artist later was the desire to express myself, the duality of life, the contradictions within yourself.”
This came to a head one September in New York when the beauty of the season produced in Norma both happiness and melancholia, and she wanted to express that. She began actively working on her technique, taking classes and working initially in figurative styles, which her teachers encouraged her to do.
“But here in the last four or five years, I’ve been doing more abstract art,” she says with a faint air of relief.
What goes through the mind of an abstract artist is a mystery to most (perhaps all) of us.
“The way I work is, I go in front of a canvas without intention,” she says. “I have a palette and I randomly take some paint and start working. And I may work on three, four, five, six paintings at the same time.”
So, does she find this island a good place to be an artist?
“If you like warm weather it’s certainly an inspiring place to be because of the diversity of the cultures,” she offers. “I was lucky enough to be able to acquire this land, so this studio is not small. I enjoy a very nice working environment for painting. In terms of selling your work and being appreciated for what you do it’s a little bit challenging here but you are connected internationally. I’ve got an international airport ten minutes away. And there are a lot of retired people who come here from the US and other places for three or four months a year and who do have an appreciation of art and are happy to find you.”
Virtually any conversation here at the moment comes around sooner or later to Hurricane Irma, and while this property seems, at a glance anyway, quite unscathed, the paintings and words on the walls tell their own story.
There is a collection of Norma’s recent work inspired by a competition in which people were invited to submit a haiku – that very demanding Japanese three-line poem format that boils expression down to a minimum.
“I didn’t intend to refer to Irma in any of these paintings, but look at them,” she says. And sure enough, there are swirls and waves, lots of violent movement in evidence. “Also,” she points out, “Of all the haikus we received, I think only two contained no reference to hurricanes.
Click here to visit the official website of Norma Trimborn >>>
