Postcard From Haiti: July 2024 by Rick Forgham
June is a month known for weddings so it would seem to be the perfect time to showcase a wedding painting by Micius Stephane…Except, wait a minute! Who is the young woman in the green dress who has appeared on the scene?
Marriage Gate or Spoiled Wedding was painted in 1979 and is Stephane’s interpretation of an event that has been portrayed by many Haitian artists. As is often the case with his paintings Stephane's realization of this disrupted wedding is straightforward in its narrative. Other artists’ portrayals of disrupted weddings, notably those by Rigaud Benoit, can include overturned church pews, fainting relatives, and an overall far more chaotic scene. But let us take a closer look at Stephane’s painting.
Stephane was married to a blind woman to whom he was completely devoted. His paintings often include subjects whose eyes are magnetically staring at the viewer from his compositions. It is quite easy to imagine that due to his wife’s disability, Stephane developed his unique ability to portray heightened emotion through the expressive eyes of individuals in his paintings.
In this painting, the wide-eyed gaze of the priest, the altar boy, and the bystanders tell us that they have all spotted the woman in the green dress whose hands are defiantly placed on her hips. While Stephane has included these simple yet powerful visual indicators that things could rapidly go downhill for this wedding. The viewer is left to consider for themselves the possible outcome that will result from this untimely encounter.
There is also the village setting. In this painting, Stephane pays homage to his hometown of Bainet where he was born. The church in the painting is a scaled-down rendering of The Basilica St. Pierre, first constructed in 1851, that anchors the central plaza of Bainet. This beautiful cream-colored church that is topped with a red roof often served as the architectural centerpiece of paintings by another artist from Bainet…Edgar Jn. Baptiste.
Additionally, the homes that surround the plaza are reduced to the vernacular style of the common dwelling with their highly pitched corrugated metal roofs, and windows with shutters that frame patterned curtains which flutter in the breeze coming off the nearby Caribbean Sea.
Bainet is enviably situated on a crescent-shaped bay on the Caribbean side of Haiti’s southern peninsula and is about thirty miles east of the better-known city of Jacmel. The town is perhaps three hundred years old and its inhabitants are renowned in the region for being attractive women and handsome men. With an abundance of fresh water, which comes from over one hundred fifty springs in the hills surrounding Bainet the area’s farmers can produce a variety of crops including some of the finest coffee grown in the Caribbean.
Given all this, Bainet would be the perfect place to hold the perfect wedding, except for the fact that a young woman in a green dress has suddenly appeared and may have other thoughts.
Rick Forgham June 2024
