Artist’s ‘fruit of the spirit’

Mélanie-Rose Cantin shows some of the paintings
from her forthcoming exhibition, Tutti Fruity at Full of
Beans restaurant in Pasadora Place in George Town

Some of the new paintings from the new show at Full
of Beans, called Tutti Fruity

Friday,  January 27, 2006

Tutti Fruity is a new exhibition by local artist, Melanie-Rose Cantin. The exhibition opens on Friday 3 February, at the Full of Beans Café, Pasadora Place in George Town.

Her new collection of artwork draws on many different literary and biblical quotations about fruits, and apart from paintings, six different bread boards, each with a different quotation, accompany the paintings. 
Some of her new paintings will also be used to illustrate a children’s story Ms Cantin is writing, Tutti Fruity Kingdom. 

Biologically speaking, fruits follow flowers, and so Ms Cantin’s Tutti Fruity exhibition follows on from her recent Homo Floresiensis exhibition, where different people were painted as different kinds of flowers.

Tutti Fruity seeks to personify fruits in a similar way, but this time the fruits are not always biological. As the title suggests, the exhibition is about all fruits, so that many of the fruits depicted are intangible fruits of the spirit, soul and the emotions. 

Some of the paintings have come from a list of The Fruit of the Spirit, given in the Bible’s Book of Galatians. 

These are: Love; Joy; Peace; Longsuffering; Gentleness; Goodness; Faith; Meekness; and Temperance, and Ms Cantin depicts each of these as different people. One of Ms Cantin’s own attributes, not found in the Book of Galatians, is a sense of fun, which often shows in the paintings.

One painting, depicting the fruit of ‘gentleness’, appears as the face of a person; it is a painting of gentleness personified. 

Upon closer inspection, however, the person’s nose is actually found to be composed of an elephant’s trunk, and the head of a tiny elephant is resting on the person’s forehead. Ms Cantin explained:

“Elephants can be very gentle creatures when they’re respected, but if they’re not, they can be very aggressive. I saw an article about elephants mourning the death of one of them. Later they went to the nearby village and completely destroyed it. I find that a lot of the gentlest people can also be the bravest,” she said.

Ms Cantin often uses fruits as a symbol for bringing new life.

“For me, as a woman, I see the ovaries as flowers and the uterus is pear-shaped, it is the fruit. The ovum is the seed,” she said. 

“There is one painting called ‘Womb with a view,’ which is like one of the paintings of the Mexican painter, Frida Kalho. She did a lot of paintings to heal herself, and after she had a natural abortion, she painted her fetus.” 

Ms Cantin’s paintings speak to the complete human, body, soul and spirit.

Listening waves is a strange, dreamlike painting. There is a woman inside a conch shell, and there is another woman outside, listening at the mouth of the shell. It relates to Ms Cantin’s experiences as a birth assistant, of being with a mother during birth. It is a painting about the assistant finding empathy with the mother, as both women tune into the waves of birth pain.

The painting makes a powerful statement, ostensibly about listening, but it is the deeper listening of the heart, of the spirit and the emotions.

It is about the willingness to go beyond listening and become one with that person. It is a comment on the rush of the world we live in, where we have lost touch with natural rhythms so that we can no longer hear nature’s voice. It is a comment on a world where we are out of touch, with nature, God, one another, and with our own hearts. 

Ms Cantin is telling us the steps we must take, first by beginning to listen once again.

“They are on the same wavelength, the woman giving birth, the assistant, and the fetus. The waves of pain are bringing harmony. 

“As we go through something difficult together, there is a harmony that comes with the riding of those waves,” Ms Cantin said.

Speaking about the fruit of the biblical knowledge of Good and Evil, which Ms Cantin has painted as an apple, Ms Cantin said: “To the Celts, the apple symbolized death. It is also the symbol for a teacher. If you’ve eaten the fruit of knowledge too much, to me, that means you’ve over-developed your mental capacity (at the expense of other things), and can no longer taste all the other fruits.

“Then there is a danger you will ignore other kinds of knowledge, like the knowledge the body gives you, or emotional knowledge, or intuition,” she said.

christopher@caymannetnews.com

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