As Nature painted the perfect backdrop with the wind, the mist, the rains and the grassland at Wagamon, Makeda gave life to her canvas with fiery colours. As she painted, soaking in the peace of the moment, her husband, a musician known as Rebel Layonn, played the flute. Art, Nature and music created a perfect symphony.
The couple from Haiti has just spent a month at Palette People in Wagamon as art residents, working and experimenting with ideas. For both, art is a means to reach the soul.
Makeda, whose real name is Christina Clodomir, says she adopted the Ethiopian word, which means beauty, as her artistic name. “It is also the name of the Queen of Sheba,” she adds. Her husband James Vergneau picked the name Rebel Layonn. “Layonn in Creole means ‘the one’.”
Makeda says her journey into art was by chance. She was studying interior architecture at Canada when her teachers urged her to start painting. “It took me a year to finally get around to painting and to my surprise I found that I could. My works were appreciated by my friends and that was very encouraging,” she says.
A dancer who started dancing at the age of three, Makeda got into professional dancing at the age of 14. “I’ve learnt a lot of styles including the cha-cha, tango, jazz and ballet. But professionally, I was exploring a combination of Haitian native plus contemporary,” she says.
Since her first art exhibition in 2011, Makeda has devoted most of her time to art. She has travelled the world, exhibiting her works and the response from the viewers fills her up with renewed passion, she says. She works using acrylic and they are usually realistic paintings of plants and flowers in particular. One of the defining features of her work is her use of colours, which veer toward the fluorescent palette. “I always work with very bright colours and some times when I don’t find what I am looking for, I compose my own colours,” she says. In the series “Ether Lines”, she attempts to go further than her usual style. “I wanted to capture the energy field around the plant. I see the plant as an ethereal being, and not just a plant. It is in this series that I have used fluorescent colours the most.”
Both Makeda and Rebel believe that Haiti has influenced their work. “Political instability, poverty and dictatorship cannot take away from Haiti’s profound cultural history. There is just so much to draw from culturally,” says Rebel. His music brings out a lot of Haitian roots music. “Haitian roots music has its origins in Africa and there is a lot of percussion in it. There are about 121 rhythms alone,” he says. Rebel is credited with bringing in reggae into Haitian music and his work is centred around a fusion of Haitian roots music with reggae. His debut project, “Mission”, was released last year.
During his stay in Kerala, Rebel got the opportunity to listen to Indian music and was fascinated by its “spiritual quality”. He plans to come back and collaborate with musicians here.
Makeda and Rebel are ardent yoga practitioners. Makeda learnt a lot of it herself, but eventually learnt it technically as she aspires to teach yoga. Rebel on the other hand is a “yogi” who’s been practising it for years now. “Yoga is as much for the mind as it is for the body. And there are different ways in which it can be practised,” Rebel says.
