Célestin Faustin was born in Lafond, Haiti in 1948 and named
for his grandmother, Célestina, a practitioner of vodou who was an important
influence in his life. She said he was claimed at birth by the goddess Erzulie
Dantor, who conferred upon him an exceptional artistic talent that was obvious
even in his youth. At the age of nineteen he studied with Wilmino Domond, but
asserted his independence afer a year, developing a style of his own that was
haunting, poetic, hallucinatory, surreal, and erotic. Most of his paintings
tell a story and often they convey a profound personal anguish and a deep
ambivalence about vodou beliefs. Not long before his tragic death in 1981 (age
33), the art critic Ute Stebich wrote that Faustin was "one of the most
extraordinary Haitian painters, with seemingly limitless possibilities."
