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PAINTING SERIES
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Early Work |
"[T}he Haitian creative drive, which is practically a national compulsion, stems from a suffocating social structure and is truly a desire to ascend to a mental freedom. In that sense, Haitian art share{s} in an important contemporary issue: the desire to dwell on the TRANSCENDENTAL....I am an artist, not a voodooist, and as such, a reality of a mystical order such as Damballa can only come to me as it is filtered through the social context in which it thrives. I was dealing then not with the "god" himself but with the living myth of him. In my early imagery on these subjects there is a confrontation or at least a proximity between the human and the divine."
- Paul Gardère, A Brief Account of My Special Relationship to the Art of Haiti