Canute Caliste; Naive painter of the Caribbean
Hyfler/Rosner
Naive painter famed for his idiosyncratic portrayal of
Caribbean island life
Peter Mason
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian
Paintings:
http://www.spiceisle.com/art_caribbean/page5.htm
http://www.paradise-inn-carriacou.com/images/canute_steel_pan.jpg
http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/grenada/conference/papers/Canute%20Caliste%202.jpg
http://www.spiceisle.com/mains/art/page7.htm
Few internationally celebrated artists can have spent their
lives working in humbler surroundings than the naive painter
Canute Caliste, whose studio was a lean-to shack in the
backyard of his wooden house on the tiny Caribbean island of
Carriacou, off the coast of Grenada.
Surrounded by chickens and other farmyard animals, Caliste,
who has died aged 91, produced fascinating, quirky paintings
of island life that attracted a wide fan base in Europe and
the United States, where art collectors embraced him as a
charming and idiosyncratic painter in the primitive style.
Frequently as eccentric as the paintings he produced,
Caliste had a sign at the end of his garden path in the
village of L'Esterre that read: "This way to the great
artist." He may not quite have warranted that epithet, but,
for many, his awkwardly painted figures and reportage style
conveyed the charm and traditions of the Caribbean in much
the same way that Lowry encapsulated industrial northern
England. His paintings of fishing boats, cricket matches,
carnival dances and domestic rows usually displayed a good
deal of humour and no particular concern for accuracy -
though a devout Roman Catholic, for instance, his painting
of the Last Supper depicted 15 disciples.
Working mainly with acrylics on hardboard, Caliste could
knock out 20 paintings in a day in his prime, and would run
out of supplies almost as soon as he got hold of them.
Though he had many other interests - and he was an
accomplished musician - he lived to paint, and did so for
most of his life.
Caliste claimed to have been inspired to begin painting
seriously at the age of nine, when he was told by a vision
of a mermaid that, if he followed the Bible, he could
achieve anything he wanted. After that, mermaids appeared as
a constant theme in his work, but his main preoccupation was
the everyday scenes of Carriacou, an island 13 miles square,
23 miles north-east of Grenada.
Though he initially painted purely for his own enjoyment
while making a living as a boatbuilder and fisherman,
Caliste's talent was spotted in the late 1950s by a local
nun, Sister Trudy, who sold some of his works in a gift shop
she ran. As tourism to the island increased in the 1960s,
Caliste, by now well into his 40s, began to pick up
word-of-mouth trade as visiting "yachties" trekked up the
hill to his studio from the nearby harbour - or came by taxi
from the island's capital, Hillsborough - to buy souvenir
paintings at a few dollars a time.
When an American, Jim Rudin, arrived in Grenada from New
York in 1966 to open the Yellow Piou art gallery in St
Georges, a friend of Caliste brought over a selection of his
paintings from Carriacou, and Rudin liked what he saw. He
exhibited Caliste's work for the next 20 years, selling in
decent quantities. Indeed, it was Rudin who suggested, in
the 1970s, that Caliste write short commentaries at the
bottom of his paintings to indicate what they were
depicting. Caliste took to the idea, and his scribbled
jottings, full of spelling mistakes and bad syntax - "Lovers
coartin", "general hurspetal in Grenada" - became one of his
endearing trademarks.
Also in the early 1970s, the US-based anthropologist Donald
Hill brought Caliste to further attention by including him
in a doctoral thesis on Carriacou and buying up large
amounts of his paintings, some of which he gave to Smith
College in New York.
But Caliste's big break came in the late 1980s, when another
American, Lora Berg, who lived in Barbados and worked in the
US embassy there, visited Grenada and happened to see his
paintings. She asked to meet Caliste and decided to produce
a coffee-table book, The Mermaid Wakes, showcasing his work.
Published in 1989, the book brought Caliste to much wider
attention, and almost immediately his work was in greater
demand. Art lovers from the US and Europe began ringing
Rudin to commission Caliste to produce works similar to
those in the book, and his paintings even found their way
into the collections of George Bush senior and the Queen.
As he became more renowned, Caliste was visited by foreign
journalists and began appearing habitually in magazine
articles and travel literature. The Grenada tourist board
latched on to him as a marketing vehicle for Carriacou, and
he was exhibited at venues around the world, including the
Research Institute in New York, the OAS Museum in Washington
DC and the Pedro De Osma Museum in Lima, Peru.
His paintings - always signed "Mr Canute Caliste" - were so
unusual that they rarely failed to elicit a reaction,
positive or negative. "People used to walk into my gallery
and their eyes would nearly always fall on his work," said
Rudin. "Then they'd either say they were the best things I
had in the gallery or ask me how I could exhibit such junk."
None the less, Caliste's work generally met with puzzlement
in the West Indies, where the general reaction was: "My
child could do that".
In terms of quality, Caliste's golden era was probably in
the 1980s, when he also painted some large works on canvas.
In his latter days, the quality declined as his sight faded,
and although he could still produce good work into his 80s
when he put his mind to it, he fell into the habit of
reproducing versions of scenes he had done before, rather
than painting something new.
Relative to the average income in Carriacou, Caliste made a
lot of money from his art, but most of it went on supporting
his 22 children (predominantly by two women) and around 100
grandchildren. Even before the death of his wife Vonice -
and well into his 80s - he was fond of keeping much younger
girlfriends, and would be happy to supply them with various
material needs.
As a result, he still lived in the same humble house, with
its outdoor oven, that he had built for himself as a young
man. He often said it was providing for his children that
was the motivating factor behind his prodigious work rate.
Caliste's lifestyle barely changed; he rarely left
Carriacou, apart from a couple of funded trips to the US or
to attend an occasional official function in Grenada as a
VIP, and he produced many of his documentary-style
paintings - such as those on the Grenadian revolution of
1979 - from television images and his imagination.
A quietly spoken but open and friendly man, he was slim and
energetic throughout his life, and generous to a fault. If a
visitor happened to make a personal trip to his studio, they
were likely to come away with an armful of paintings bought
for well below their market value. Even Caliste's more
mundane works sold for around $300-$400 and his better ones
could fetch in excess of $2,500. But in person, he would
happily sell at $10 a time, often throwing a second in free.
In Grenada and Carriacou, Caliste was more widely respected
as a fiddle player who specialised in playing music in the
endangered quadrille dance style. He performed at weddings
and boat launches well into old age, and even featured as
the star turn on at least two CDs of Carriacou music
marketed around the world. What he lacked in technique he
made up for with his dedication to retaining the old culture
of Carriacou, which is known for its especially strong
African tradition. As a result, the islanders called him,
reverentially, "Old Head".
· Canute Caliste, artist, born April 16 1914; died November
20 2005