Timeline: an essay by Erica M. James, Ph.D.
Curator of the national art gallery of the Bahamas (2005)
“She has traveled far to be here: Haiti, Belgium, The Bahamas. She says that as one travels, many things known fall away. Besides items taken in suitcases, hands, trunks, and in some cases, one’s back, the only thing that remains true to the individual on such a journey is their soul.
Chantal Bethel’s journey has been shaped in large part by sudden transitions necessitated by crises and forces beyond her control. But like all of us, each place and each experience lived has left a trace on her soul. It is these traces and their accompanying emotions that spill onto her canvases.
Inspired by the historic Haitian School of Beauty, a movement that was led by artists such as the late Bernard Sejourne and Emilcar Simil whose dreamy evocative paintings celebrated women, Bethel’s work has in recent years come into its own. Though the School of Beauty’s paintings were characteristically pretty to look at, they were driven by a social imperative in that the artists who followed the school’s philosophy sought to create beauty in opposition to the increasing, harrowing realities of everyday life in Haiti. Like the school, the composition, colour, and spirit of Bethel’s work seem to, in a word, give the audience a “pretty” picture. However, the content of the work coming from the School was found in their objective beauty, whereas the content of Bethel’s pretty things sometimes lie in the disconcerting secrets of their narratives and signs. Like her native Haiti, where nothing is as it appears and where one’s ability to dissemble is often directly correlated to one’s ability to survive, the life of Bethel’s work, its content, exists somewhere between what is imagined and what is known." (Click here to continue reading.)
Passage through the islands of shallow water: an essay by Krista Thompson PH D
Excerpt from the Anthology Marginal Migrations, the circulation of cultures
within the Caribbean.
Warwick University – Caribbean Studies 2003
Chantal Bethel calls attention to the possible terrors involved in the flight across Bahamian waters. In the painting Exodus 1999, the artist provides a disturbing portrayal of boats in the midst of a night time journey by sea. In the work, visages of the dead haunt the surrounding waters. With mouths and eyes wide open, they call out from the ocean’s depths. The sail of boats transform into a threatening host of sharks’ fins. A hand grasping a machete,a gun, the hat of a Tonton Macoute, are all icons that point to the reign of terror from which migrants seek to escape. Bethel drew from her own vivid memories of the Tonton Macoutes from her childhood in Haiti and her own families’ flight from Haiti to escape Papa Doc’s regime. A departure from her usual subject-matter, Bethel describes the work as “something she had to do”. The painting was a kind of personal exorcism, in which she purged her own childhood Remembrances. The work again foregrounds the many potential hazards of migration, from being consumed by the sea’s waves or sharks, while pointing to some of the reasons why people brave these journeys: “Never ending political unrest, oppression and cruel treatment by a secret police, discrimination, unbearable poverty, (and) lawlessness would cause them to go to any length to flee their homeland hoping for a better life”. (Click here to continue reading.)
Paradise? - An Essay by Susan Moir Mackay, B.A. (Hons.)
Edinburgh College of Art
Living in The Bahamas this may seem like a redundant question: don’t we know and live with warm skies, endless golden beaches and the impossible turquoise of the ocean?
However, for artist Chantal Bethel, this is a valid question. On the heels of her piece Agonistes – and emotionally raw installation describing the turmoil during and after the last three hurricanes that hit The Bahamas – she felt compelled to balance the angst by exploring the light after the dark – “ the calm after the storm”. Posing this question, “What is Paradise”? to friends and associates, Bethel was given a divers range of answers which she incorporated into her piece, “What is Paradise? A hanging piece, written on canvas, it holds excerpts of the replies she received, along with the image of a key, a heart, and a face. (Click here to continue reading.)