Castera Bazile

b Jacmel, 26 Nov 1923; d Port-au-Prince, 1966). Haitian painter. Orphaned at an early age and no stranger to deprivation, Bazile was forced to seek work rather than attend school. He moved to Port-au-Prince and found employment as a houseboy with the American Dewitt Peters (1901-66). Witnessing gatherings of artists at the Centre d'Art, he soon expressed a desire to try his hand at painting and became a full-time painter in 1945. He began producing compositions of the life he knew, powerful volumetric images with strong contrasts of light and dark and a firm contour.