How appropriate that an exhibition mounted by acclaimed English ex-patriate artist, Deirdre Hyde, titled ‘Ode to Water’ should open in the middle of Costa Rica’s rainy season.

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I paddled through wet streets to attend the opening the other evening in the wonderful old National Museum in downtown San Jose, the converted old fortress still riddled with bullet holes from the 1948 civil war.

Deirdre’s work is known to just about any visitor to Costa Rica for her detailed nature posters found in most hotels and souvenir shops; I love the one of brightly coloured poison dart frogs clutching onto jungle bromeliads that hangs in my son’s room.

Deirdre, or ‘Didi’ to friends, arrived in Costa Rica by the most original route I’ve so far come across. After graduating from Reading University in Fine Arts and working in that artists’ enclave, Cornwall, for a while, she was invited back in 1979 to form part of a small group of offbeat adventurers to live on remote Cocos Island for six months, “just to see what happenedà”

Now, Cocos (“the second wettest place on earth”) is over 500 kms offshore, there is no airline access and boats still take over two days to sail there. Living on rice and beans supplied on a fairly regular basis by the Coast Guards with fresh water from the island, Didi not only survived her half-year stint (much better, in fact, than her male companions!), she fell in love with the place and has actively lobbied for its protection ever since.

When she moved into the mainland, she joined the National Park Service producing promotional artwork and mounting museum displays. She was also contracted by the World Wildlife Fund as a consultant in the mid 1980s and traveled to Nicaragua (until the collapse of the Sandinistas), Brazil, Mexico, Italy and the Cape Verde islands supporting conservation efforts, creating visitor centers and always painting.

Didi’s vivacity is infectious – who else would enthuse about paying her electricity bills? “Look, do you realise that about 97% of our electricity here comes from renewable resources? I love paying my bill knowing that!“

Her views on life in Costa Rica are equally positive. “Over the years, things have become familiar and it is so easy to live here because it is freewheeling but orderly at the same time.”

Didi has built a house in a lush, tree-filled hidden valley in Santa Ana, west of San Jose, part of a residential cooperative, and while she admits there were the inevitable headaches of construction, the regulations are nothing compared to the U.K. and being environmentally aware, the rules were a pleasure to follow.

“Costa Rica is good for me and my neuroses!” says Didi. “It’s a nurturing place and there is a lot of respect among my professional colleagues and peers. They are an extremely cultured people.”

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As part of her commitment to give something back to her adopted country, she happily accepted putting together a one-woman show for the VIII Festival Madre Fertil, Tierra Nuestra (Fertile Mother, Our Land Festival) when she was approached last year by the organisers. The Festival’s theme is about adapting to a new culture about water but otherwise, Didi’s painting brief was open.

Twelve months and some 45 works later, the exhibition opened to reveal an exotic and celebratory array of paintings varying from delicate pen and ink works, oriental influenced collages to huge swirling colourful canvases in acrylics and even a three-panel screen full of fluid aquatic tones and shapes.

Didi is somehow typical of the very untypical people you tend to meet here. A fascinating original herself, much like her paintings, a nonconformist who has successfully acclimated to her tropical home.

She is passionate about helping to protect Costa Rica and without losing her very English identity has fully integrated into embracing and accepting the idiosyncracies and challenges faced in any culture different from one’s own, producing celebratory and vibrant works of art that help remind the rest of us, just how special this little country is.

You can see much of her work at www.deirdre-hyde.com

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Written by Vicky Longland – Vicky has spent all her adult life in Latin and Central America originally as head of the translation department for an international human development organisation and currently working as a freelance translator and writer for several national and world-wide publications, specialising in people’s issues, the environment and lifestyles.


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