Quotes
People are predominant in my paintings. Although they are not obvious, you can feel their presence.
My mother stopped painting to become a good spouse. One of my aunts was an artist. The American artist, Kira Markham, and I lived in the same district.
My most recent paintings are a mixture of realism and futurism, representation and geometrical distortion to reflect movement.
My first paintings were anatomic, monochrome, with close-up characters and spots of colors in the background or they were barely worked out. Then I started to develop structures, superposition to amplify emotion.
My first concern was to take care of my drawing. I did not have any knowledge in arts, especially Haitian arts, apart from the paintings I saw in my father's office.
Jean-Michel Basquiat would not be the genius he presently is. Haitian art is sold at Sotheby's or in Drouault, even if Haitian naive art is treated like a poor relation in books of Art History.
If you want to evaluate the new generation, those artists who are now arising, the students, there is certainly a lot of talented young people "in embryo" awaiting favorable conditions to come to light. We need a real open and dynamic School of Art.
I worked three and then six hours a day in my studio with strict discipline and emotion. I obtained awards usually granted to other foreigners during the end-of-year admission tests.
I will add that, since my younger years, I learned to appreciate Haitian Art with my father, who worked in a building in the "Bicentenaire", where the halls hosted art exhibitions.
I used to draw during my final year of school. When I was studying in the United States, I used to draw during my English classes. My teacher talked about me with one of his colleagues, who was responsible for the Art Section and who lead me to two famous art schools of New York.
I paint according to the moment and the theme. I don't have any prejudice. Life concerns me.
I like children, old people expressive faces, the curves of female nudes, the lines of a breast, the curves of a woman's hip, to paraphrase Aznavour.
I have always been skeptical about the expression "young artists". Many artists were famous in their twenties. Age is not a factor, an artistic notation.
I did not follow a regular cycle. Concerning painting, Daniel Green and then Hugh Gumpel, who understood that I was in search of something else than simply the academic route, were my teachers.
I am not an adept of voodoo, but I respect this religion just like the others. It is an important mainstay of our culture. From the beginning I introduced "veves" in my popular paintings to emphasize authenticity while avoiding folklore and demagogy.
I am in contact with other artists of the Black Diaspora, who make similar researches in the field of representation-abstraction, as the artist, Hector Charpentier from Martinique, says.
At that time, the academic orientation was rather technical contrary to that of the university, where art theory is very important. The teachers were renowned artists and among the best of that time.
At that time, a painting representing Martin Luther King's life drew the attention of a jury for the granting of a subsidy to American mural specialists. I was contacted, but I refused to change my nationality.
They don't have special rights because we have civil rights laws that protect them. The laws work both ways.
There were also good parts with the budget; mostly we restored funding for K-12 education and won an additional $1.2 billion for 100,000 new teachers in grades 1-3 around the country. So there were a lot of parts that were good, a lot of parts that made no sense, but with so much in there it's hard to decide what to do with it. So I voted for it.