ARTIST STATEMENT
My work as a painter has drawn on the powerful early sensations and visual excitement of childhood in Haiti, spent at a time when people seemed magically connected to their surroundings and to an invisible realm nevertheless experienced as palpable, tangible and powerful.
The overtones of my work have been about promoting the knowledge, appreciation and respect of Haiti and its culture, showing the inherent universality of religious needs and beliefs. The undertones of the work have dealt with addressing issues of negative stereotypes about black people, problems of racism and negative racial identity fostered by these stereotypes.
My passion however, is in the spiritual—the force that inspires, magnifies and propels human imagination, heart and will—the God that established, elaborates and refines human perception, inspiring choices and influencing final deeds.
As the drive behind my work is my interest in religion and the religious need, it is possible that my imagery will increasingly detach from the physical world in order to express the metaphysics of religion in more meaningful ways. While I believe that there is only one God, my vehicle will remain within the familiar—my birth-given Christian faith. I hereby disavow and separate myself from any anthropological studies or involvement with Haitian indigenous faiths that I might have undergone in the past.
My artistic preference has always been other than the purely abstract. I invite viewers into a dialogue by conveying an idea in visual terms. In order to do this, I need images that have recognizable relevance to the physical world. I have enjoyed raising moral, aesthetic, religious and psychoanalytical issues that have universal relevance by manipulating various elements of physical life in terms of their metaphorical meaning.
In the end however, my paintings must be experienced and remembered as sensuous, color studies where energy and action are across the surface. The skin of the painting is seen as an echo of the human skin that uniquely expresses, and reveals, all internal, emotional shifts, over the complex, intricate, inviting variations of its surface texture and glow.
Contemporary art describes work produced in any given point on the globe. Populations of the world are no longer being confined to their original shores. Different cultures are colliding with each other and entering each others' imagination. Any culture's attempt to articulate its perception of the universe benefits all others. I believe that because of its visual qualities, and also beyond them, my art can act as a significant and continuous magnet for spiritual discovery of the one, and intellectual interaction of the many.
Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell