The Tribune

By ALESHA CADET

Tribune Features Reporter

acadet@tribunemedia.net

A HOPELESS situation can easily turn into a life-changing moment, and Troy “Straight Up” Peter can attest to that. After surviving a horrific car accident in 2003, Troy decided to focus on his love of art.

The accident left him with a disability, a damaged left leg, but it pushed him in the right direction, and his success since then has been impressive.

With his injuries leaving him in extreme pain, Troy said he began to go though a reinvention and recovery process to find himself.

“After 15 surgeries, I was still going through the recuperation process and trying to find another way to fit in and be able to contribute to my own life and surroundings. The only thing that was easy for me to hold on to was art because I’ve always been an artist, but I had put it down from the time I left high school,” he said.

“Art is not an easy profession to make it in, at least back then it wasn’t. So even though I was good at it in school, I didn’t pursue it as a career. Because of the unfortunate situation with my injury, it gave me a chance to make a fortunate situation out of it, which was to get back into art.”

In recent times, Troy said, he has just gone deeper and deeper into his love for art. One particular medium he has gone full steam ahead with is his coconut art.

Troy believes he is now at the level where he has mastered the medium.

“It is now to the level where I can actually use it to educate and teach it to others. It evolves and we can be proud as Bahamians to be able to produce something like this. I speak in terms of we because that is how I think; I work for God and country,” he told Tribune Arts and Entertainment.

“I personally call my art ‘Straight Up Art’, and the medium is strictly coconut creations. What people consider useless, I make into art. After manipulating and going through a process of trial and error, you in the end find out the piece is no longer useless, but useful,” said Troy.

He said sometimes people offer him coconut husks after they pass by his home and see him working on his art on his doorstep.

“Instead of throwing it away, they know that I can make use of the stuff. They themselves enjoy what I do. Sometimes I wake up and meet the materials on my doorstep. I told them to do it if they want to, so it is not like they are dumping trash. The refuge of the coconut tree is my valuable raw material that has been able to get me very far,” he said.

Troy said the marvellous thing about being an artist is that you can go from the simple stages of the craft to producing fine art. He calls this a magnificent evolutionary story of transformation.

“I have been fortunate and blessed to have been used as a tool and a door to introduce this to the world. Within the past seven years I have created many things that I can’t even really recall anymore. My work has even left the country, and in the early stages I wasn’t really recording and keeping note,” he said.

“I have done a Joseph Spence piece, the ‘Majestic Beast’, which is a piece known to most as a lion, but it is not; it is a full-sized beast that I think was inside of me. It expressed how I was feeling at the time when I created it. It took me on a journey because I was really ‘mash up’.”