Monthly Archives: March 2010
Engagement photos – Beach
Blog beginnings
I first began frequenting blogs while working on an art contract for a large resort on Providenciales. I had an order for 680 shadowboxes, which I was thrilled to land and zealous to start. A quarter of the way through it I began to lose my artistic mojo. When I lived in the United States it was an easy fix. I would visit an art museum, a library, an architectural salvage, a gallery, a flea market, or my favorite shopping district, and presto . . . my mojo was back. Living on a small Caribbean island the options are far fewer. After many visits to beautiful beaches, nature walks, and slow drives through charming areas like Blue Hills, I still couldn’t find it. I buried myself in my books in my office and then turned to the laptop for help. The internet became my mode of transport and blogs became my library, my gallery, my museum. All free, easy to access, and full of great insight and ideas. I am now a loyal follower of a select few, and always on the lookout for a new blogpspot that catches my eye or my interests. A big thanks to fellow bloggers who make life easier, smarter, craftier, more eco friendly, etc. You make the world a better place!
Blue Hills
The island I call home is Providenciales, the most populated and developed in the Turks and Caicos chain of approximately 40 islands and cays. Providenciales was formerly known as Blue Hills, and luckily this charming name is still in use for one of the most quaint and colorful areas on the island. A drive down Blue Hills road one will see traditional and contemporary architecture, large bustling churches, seaside cemeteries, and brightly painted boats and native sloops. All along the road, just feet away, lies the arching palm tree lined beach, one of the few outside the national park where you may go shelling. The people dotting the streets are just as noteworthy as the environment; schoolchildren in uniform, fisherman at work, teenagers playing hoops, men slapping down dominoes, and women walking to mass in big beautiful hats and tailored suits. Not only is it a fantastic place to take a slow drive and soak in the sights, it’s highly recommended you stop into one of the restaurants and soak in some native fare and beverage. Here you may just be able to watch your conch being caught, knocked, and prepared before it sits on your plate. The photo above is one of my first portraits of Blue Hills, taken in 2004.
Name origin of the Turks and Caicos
Terrestrial globe made by Vincenzo Coronelli for Louis XIV, currently displayed in the Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterrand in Paris.
How the Turks and Caicos came to be named as such is still partially shrouded in mystery. Voyages in search of salt set sail in 1585 for “Island Caycos,” a derivative of “caya hico,” the Lucayan term for “string of islands”. The “Turks” is where it gets more interesting. The rare color map “Archipelague du Mexique” pictured in the last posting is the first time the term was recorded, in 1688 by the leading cartographer of his time, Vincenzo Coronelli. Vincenzo had produced his first work at 16 and his industrious career of 140 separate works ended with his death in Venice at the age of 68. The partnership of Coronelli and Jean-Baptiste Nolin Sr. is said to have resulted in many of the best regional maps of the Americas of the period. On the said map, next to Grand Turk is written “I. de Viejo, Conciua ou Turks”. Some historians have deciphered this as a comment, erroneously written, which should have read “Concina ou Turks,” or “where the Turks gather”. In these days, Turks was a reference to pirates. Ottoman ships, manned by Turkish sailors, had the reputation of dealing in piracy, as did some Bermudians, who were beginning to settle in the TCI. Another popular theory, as told on the National Trust tour of the Cheshire Hall Plantation on Providenciales, relays that Europeans first sighting the islands witnessed hundreds of red Persian turbans on the horizon. What they misinterpreted as Turkish inhabitants was actually the plentiful native red capped cactus, thus named the “Turk’s Head Cactus”.