Boscoe Holder dies
Sunday, April 22 2007
click on pic to zoom inBoscoe Holder...Well-known artist, Boscoe Holder, is dead. He died yesterday afternoon at his home in Newton with his wife Sheila and two nurses at his bedside. Holder had been ailing for over a year, according to family friend Mark Pereira, owner of 101 Art Gallery.
“He was in his mid 80’s, his body was just tired,” Pereira said.
Holder led a celebrated artistic life as a painter, dancer, costume designer, choreographer, dance instructor at the University of the West Indies, leader of an international dance group for nearly 20 years, orchestra leader and pianist.
He began painting, self-taught, at the age of five and by his seventh birthday he was already playing the piano.
Enamoured by this country’s culture, he researched and learned the local dances and songs of Trinidad and by the late 1930s he had formed a group of dancers and was producing shows depicting the music, songs and dances of Trinidad.
In 1948, Holder married Sheila Clarke and the couple had a son, Christian, the following year. In 1950 they travelled to London which became their home for the next 20 years.
He formed his group, Boscoe Holder and his Caribbean Dancers and introduced the first steel drums to England on his own television show in 1950, Bal Creole.
In the late 1960’s he returned to the country of his birth, where he quickly re-established himself as a painter, not only in Trinidad but also throughout the Caribbean. Since then he has exhibited in most of the Caribbean islands.
