ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates what Steve Bonner saw and continues to see and paint on his return trips to Barbados, trips made in order to produce art that is primarily targeted at vacationers looking for visual reminders of their island sojourns. It insists that his paintings of Barbadian landscapes, while not in keeping with the technical style of nineteenth-century Impressionism, are phenomenological impressions, which let us see what he sees. The chapter argues that his representations of Barbados constitute a retouching of his sensory experiences of a Caribbean place. Bonner organises paint on canvas so that it represents those features of the sea, rocks, trees and other details of island place as he has seen them. Each painting is a subjective construction and a marker of his subjectivity. In her discussions of visuals in tourism research Raki notes that images are infused with subjective, human viewpoints in their making.