NO. 03 OF 61
Rara
Jean-Claude Blanc (b. 1965)
$900
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Size
- 12 × 16 in
- Year
- 2022
- Price
- $900
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About the work
Rara brings Haitian music, dance and religious work onto the roads in walking bands. The celebrations continue through Lent and culminate in Easter Week. Jean-Claude Blanc’s crowd paintings include carnival parades of dancers, musicians and vendors. Here, slanting poles send movement across the canvas. Even in a still picture, their angles give the eye a beat to follow.
Men in straw hats and bright shirts dance with bent knees. Women carry baskets of coloured bottles behind them, with a drum at the lower left and a bottle stand at the right.
About the artist
Jean-Claude Blanc was born in Cap-Haïtien on 24 April 1965. His mother sold vegetables and his father was a gardener and rum distiller. In 1983 he joined the Atelier Arc-en-Ciel in Cap-Haïtien, a workshop founded by the German-born painter Laetitia Schutt and Max Gerbier, where Schutt taught him. He began with watercolor before moving on to other paints. He later settled in Port-au-Prince. His subjects include market women, often dressed in white, carnival and rara processions, jungle landscapes and people at work in the countryside.