"Antithetical" Painting

Filadelfa Rodriguez is a Filipina artist creating abstract works shaped by rhythm, emotion, and the organic movement of form. Her process often begins with loose sketches inspired by spontaneous visual flashes, intuitive forms, and imagined compositions. These fragments become the starting point from which her paintings unfold. Working primarily in oil and mixed media on canvas, she builds each piece slowly, layer by layer, guided by intuition rather than fixed ideas, until the balance feels right.

As a child, while others chased the sun, she found comfort indoors among scraps of paper and worn-down pencils. Hours passed as she drew faces, objects, and scenes from her restless imagination. Art became both play and quiet refuge, a space where her inner world could take form.

Today, her paintings explore the tension between stillness and momentum, softness and structure. Through organic forms and considered colour, she creates spaces in which viewers can pause, breathe, and experience a quiet sense of presence. She draws inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensitivity to organic form, Helen Frankenthaler’s fluidity and colour relationships, Mark Rothko’s emotional use of colour and scale, and the symbolic depth of Salvador Dalí. Together with her intuitive approach, these influences inform her exploration of abstraction as a vessel for memory, mood, and movement.

With studies in both Interior Architecture and Journalism, she values storytelling as a core element of her practice, revelling in colour and organic forms to express depth in the everyday. Filadelfa further developed her abstract practice through coursework at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), an experience that sharpened her vision and expanded her sense of possibility. She brings a sense of spatial awareness to her compositions, shaped in part by her foundation in interior design at the University of Hertfordshire. Creating art is her way of grounding her overactive imagination and her ever-seeking mind.