Awakening Painting

I discovered art, or maybe art “discovered” me, when I was a young girl. My early artistic inclinations were nurtured by the oil paintings of my grandfather, a self-taught artist. Visits to my grandfather’s house meant watching him paint in his makeshift studio, absorbing every brushstroke he made on his canvas. In a sense, I was an empty canvas – an impressionable mind that was open to infinite possibilities. Years later, while I was studying Interior Design at UP Diliman, I discovered another medium of art –watercolor. Through the summer workshops I attended, a new passion had begun to spring forth, blossoming season after season of my artistic life. In 2016, I embraced watercolor painting in full expression and pursuit. Watercolor has become a way of capturing the fluidity and translucence not palpable in other media. Its immediacy and effervescence provide a more spontaneous and energetic expression as a brushstroke releases water and pigment to do their work. Painting with watercolor is a process that allows me the space to be intuitive, and at the same time to be experimental, exploring the many possibilities of watercolor. When in Manila wrote about my first show: “Her brush speaks of the immediacy and serendipity of her watercolor. The spontaneity of her mind is in synchronous dance with her hands, all in the flow of watercolor. Nothing laborious, premeditated or tentative in her pieces. Only a boldness and energy arising not from a confidence in the self, but from a paean to the Almighty.” “The easy, unaffected dynamism and freshness of her art cannot be taught. Neither can it be caught. It is experienced. Technique can help manipulate watercolor, but there is that magic moment—spiritual, in Pinky’s case—when there is less of the artist and more of the art and the Artist. Art is lived and released in that moment, right there on the edge of craft and expression, on billowing, sensuous clouds that paint the edge of heaven and earth.” My creative process has been influenced by my introspections of the physical world around me. The way I would study nature’s behavior inspires my hand to create something that goes beyond what my mind perceives. I love the birth, the budding of each foliage, the way the sun makes its way through the objects and structures lending interesting dancing shapes to the ground I walk on.