Local artist returns to showcase paintings
He recently moved to Verona, Italy, but Belizean artist and cartoonist, Charles Chavannes, is back home and he is putting on display a collection of his most recent artwork. The seventy-five piece exhibit entitled Acquarelli Erranti includes water colour paintings inspired by the design of unique and ancient buildings of his adopted home. According to the fifty-three year old artist, his Belizean roots have also influenced the designs and outcome of his work. While he has been painting since the early 1990’s, Chavannes says this exhibit took him only six months to prepare. News Five caught up with the artist at the Image Factory today, where he says he intends to have an annual exhibit.
Charles Cravenness, Painter
“I was completely enthralled by the ancient or the old architecture that goes back to the middle eighties, some of them all the way back to the Roman times. So, what you see here will be a display of painting, of sketches and designs that I have made based on the place where I live. I’ve always been interested in not old or decrepit architecture, but architecture with a little bit of history, a little bit of age. I am not too interested in painting modern architecture. I was interested in learning how to paint water colors—water colors are a different medium; at least I was told it was a different medium. It doesn’t behave in the way you would expect it to behave. So, you have to learn about the materials that you are using—the type of paper, the type of color—so it has been an adventure for me to lean how to use the medium. Every painting that an artist does is a reflection of himself. The colors that I use in my depiction brings from Belize to wherever I go—the flavor and the passion that I developed while I was growing in Belize. The name Acquarelli Erranti in Italian basically means wondering water colors. So, son of Belize that has been wondering abroad has brought back some acquarelli from where he was to share with my people.”
The exhibit ends on September eighteenth.
