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Photo by W. P. Berry
Chantal E. Y. Bethel |
Chantal E.Y. Bethel’s paintings are attracting attention in the art world. Yet Bethel, 55, started painting full-time only five years ago. And before then, she’d painted part-time for about five years. She took up the artist brush during a bout of midlife angst.
Today, Bethel paints nearly every day in her studio in Freeport, Grand Bahama.
“I ‘draw’ my emotions to do my art,” she related in her beach-front home.
Selling for thousands of dollars apiece, her paintings hang in private and corporate collections in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Filled with vibrant colors and moods and themes, they range from a mother cradling her newborn, to dance scenes with swirling skirts, to a young woman smiling enigmatically as she ponders her racial identify. The ocean’s “spiritual” qualities are unifying themes, she explained. And so is her love of nature inherited from her father, an agronomist. Born in Haiti, she and her family fled the repressive regime of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier when she was a child.
Occasionally, her paintings explore issues of race: Though she has African ancestry, she is fair skinned, and her family came from Haiti’s educated class. Such people were discriminated against in Haiti.
Leaving Haiti, Bethel joined her mother in Belgium; her parents were separated. She always enjoyed drawing, but when she attended college in The Bahamas, where her father lived, she picked a practical major: “I studied business.”
Eventually, Bethel married a young Bahamian physician, and as she raised their three sons she put her drawing aside. Yet in her early 40s, she said, “There was something missing.”
She started painting. “It was, like, ‘I’m home!’”
Reestablishing her priorities, she studied art at the Haliburton School of The Arts in Canada and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She’s also a sculptress.
Haiti figures into some paintings dealing with social issues. “Exodus” (1999) depicts a tragic nighttime scene of Haitians escaping their island on rickety boats. One must look at it for a moment before its awful realities well up from the water. It was mentioned in a 2003 book, “Marginal Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures Within the Caribbean.”
Bethel was delighted by her painting for the Humane Society of Grand Bahama: “Amigo” depicts a dog in a “Junkanoo” carnival costume.
“When (my husband) met me, I was doing accounting. So I shook the boat a little when I said I wouldn’t do this anymore,” Bethel related. Dr. Bethel, an internist, is a former government minister.
Bethel’s artist statement reads:
“It is with pride and love that I embrace the diverse cultures which have touched my life very deeply: that of Haiti where I was born, Belgium where I was schooled and the Bahamas my beloved home. Ultimately as a woman artist, my credo is to be myself purely, simply, outrageously and completely.”
“I’m on my path, and this is something, you know, that I had to find, and I’m happy to have found it.”
“My art is like a Renaissance; it’s a midlife Renaissance,” added Bethel, with her characteristic self-effacing giggle. Some of her painting may be seen at chantalbethel.com. |
