My Own Aesthetic Realism

I like to chop heads off when I only have two or five minutes to complete a sketch from a real life model. I don't even bother accounting for the model's head, for the most part. It's just too much detail, but also, the body has more form to offer in an architectural sense. Its myriad shapes and sizes give me so much more to play with. Plus, I like to work fast -- churning drawings out like a factory on overtime. If I can help it, I try to avoid detail as much as possible in figure drawing. I save that stuff for later.

At my last figure drawing session though, I noticed that most of the artists were working in the traditional/formal sense. There was a lot of graphite and charcoal use, creating very detailed and representational figures on large paper held by board on easels. This old school splendor brought me back to art school. Proportionality, compositional balance, realistic shading and accurate lines dominated all the drawings I saw. The apparent skill all around me was intimidating. Quite the contrast to the creatures I was bringing to life on my sheets of paper: sloppy monster-like figures with garish colors and messy lines. Some terrible; some not so bad - but I had a lot of them to choose from.

I go through phases with styles of drawing. I do find extreme satisfaction from a sketch resulting in an uncanny likeness to the subject - almost like a carbon copy. There's nothing quite like this feeling. Drawing is a cathartic process, and doing so with a discipline akin to the old masters like Da Vinci provides an almost Buddhist-like experience I think. Not everyone has the motor skills to pull it off; nor the patience or the thirst for this kind of aesthetic investigation.

My investigation through drawing is not quite of this nature. I try to shake it up as much as possible -- like beheading the figure, removing other limbs, or adding a third breast for that matter. Instead of a human body, I see fragmented shapes, layers, colors and forms. I take the life out of the figure and replace it with scribble and scratches.

Every now and again I will return to representational drawing. I have the utmost respect for it, as it has everything to do with how I am able to take the opposite direction. I am always in awe when I see a picture crafted so carefully, so detailed, so realistic and precise. Especially if they are in large-scale -- I am blown away. Some of Chuck Close's portraits come to mind. One day, perhaps I will attempt something similar. But for now, I'm quite content with my monster-like figures.

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

-Eli Siegel (1902-1978)

A Hybrid Cocktail of Identity

At the end of the day, we are all mutts: mixed breeds with a pedigree spanning generations of cross-pollination and immigration. No such thing as a pure race (yep, BNP, you better believe it). Our genealogical history speaks to the color beige as the hue of the future--united, like Benetton. Free we are to connect the dots left behind by our blood lines and family ancestry; but free we are not, in the construction of an identity that is solely of our own design and making, unaffected by societal structures, culture, environment, personal experiences, or the color of our skin. You might as well be living in a vacuum if you think nothing outside infiltrates the process of identity construction. However, rest assured that you are a unique snowflake just like everyone else. Think of it as a process of negotiation. Of Self. That pretty much goes on, forever. Like osmosis, but with choice playing somewhat of a decisive role.

I really want to go see Off and Running, a feature documentary by Nicole Opper. This film offers a unique perspective on identity and displacement, experienced by a young African-American girl named Avery who was adopted by a white Jewish lesbian couple from Brooklyn. In the film preview there's this one bit where Avery is asked what it feels like to be an African-American. Her response hit the nail right on the head for me, "I don't know what that means". And why should she? Just take a look at her home and her family. Does this, however, imply that she may never get to know what it means to be African-American, or won't ever have the opportunity to be a part of that collective identity? Well, this is certainly what she tries to achieve in the film. In her own words, "...to know who I am and where I come from". But then, what about her upbringing? What should she make of the world she grew up in at home? Or her relationship with her white parents, her younger Korean brother, and older mixed-race brother? They have inextricably become a part of "who she is", no doubt. What she seeks, however, will inform what she will become, and perhaps even fill in some of the missing links of her past. It would be interesting to see what she makes of this later in her life.

Identity is a complicated subject, and a complicated journey for all of us. I myself have asked similar questions about who I am and who I should choose to be - or at least, how to present myself to the outside world. I was born in Manila, and from the age of 13 lived in England, and as an adult have also lived in other countries. My father is Filipino, and my mother is American of Polish descent. I speak both the languages of my parents, and have maintained close ties to the Philippines, the US, and England. I feel that I carry with me a deep-seated cultural understanding and can identify with being a Filipino, American and a Brit. I have also been referred to as a PhilAm (Filipino-American) or a PhilBrit (Filipino-British): each identity carrying with it a unique set of associations and cultural experience. This would be the case for hybrids of all types. And this brings us back to my beginning point, which is that we are all hybrids in the end.

But what I've truly come to realize is that my own presentation of self is largely informed by who I'm with, where I am, when and what is taking place at the time, or simply how I am feeling. I'm not saying that I feel I can conveniently pick and choose from a set of prepackaged personalities. Rather, I've grown to see the strength in the dynamism of self identity, its resilience and lack of limitation, and the power (both positive and negative) it holds for the individual and to people as a whole. We could argue that much of its fundamentals are man made constructs (think of nationalism or class identity), but we could also argue that it stems from a deeper instinctual drive that makes us who we are. Our desire or need to belong perhaps?

We are a different person to everybody. We are also a different person individually versus as a member of a group. Would I still be the same person if I was born and raised somewhere else? If I was adopted? If the color of my skin was a few shades darker, or lighter? I believe that identity is consciousness and subconsciousness, constantly rubbing off on each other. And I believe that identity is never set, and is forever fluid. It is a strength and a weakness. It is our story.

The Origin of Love

I love the soundtrack to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, particularly the song "The Origin of Love". In this song Hedwig tells the tale of one of the creation myths introduced in Plato's Symposium. Man and woman was once conjoined to make up a creature of two heads, four hands and four legs. The gods grew angry (threatened by the strength and defiance of these creatures) and split them into two (with Zeus' trusty lightning bolts - splitting them exactly in the middle). As the story goes, this separation did not destroy the bond between the two parts, but instead created a yearning that each one would have for the other half throughout their lifetime. The story of love; were two become one.

A Stranger to Myself

I am trying very hard to build up a repertoire of works on paper to show this April for the upcoming Open Studios events that will take place here in San Francisco. I'm taking a very different direction and have been challenging myself in almost every possible way I can think of. I'm experimenting with different mediums such as water color, india inks, pens and pencils.

I've grown accustomed to acrylic paints, oils, spray paint, charcoal and pastels to create my large scale (48" x 36") abstract paintings. Now I am working at a smaller scale (11" x 14") and on paper; mostly vellum, drawing and water color. I have three new gigantic stretched canvasses hanging listlessly and empty on my walls, and I am resisting the temptation to fill them up with what I know I do best. But this has become my comfort zone, and I know that it will not satisfy me in the long run. I am reserving them for what's to come of all this later. They will have to hang in anticipation of a new discovery.

For now, my sketch books have been my comfort as I struggle with studies like the one I've posted here. It's exciting because it's new and fresh, but bewildering too. I am a stranger to myself right now.

Why I Am Not A Painter

Why I Am Not a Painter

by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Michael Goldberg
Sardines
1955

This poem (and painting) was the source of inspiration for my first solo show in 2006 at the Avellana Art Gallery in Manila. It was, in fact, the title I gave to the show itself.


Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet, was mad about art and heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Many of his friends were painters, and he eventually became a curator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He wrote in loose and broken prose, and despised rhythm and formal constructs in poetry. He wrote in the 'everyday language' that had no set rules. A pure beatnik.

I found this poem particularly empowering. It made me feel that I was on the right path. That my creative method had not gone astray, and that there was some sense to it. It wasn't sloppy; it was story telling. I was simply chronicling my creative act. Many layers in my paintings have become invisible - buried under a stratum of thought and competing forms. But this never meant death to the original idea, may it be a color or a type of fish.

Making Connections and Imagining Possibilities

Thomas Nozkowski

Untitled (8-104), 2008
oil on linen on panel
22" x 28" (55.9 cm x 71.1 cm)

My last entry got me thinking even more about the kinds of rules or ideas that govern the choice of subject matter for my work. So much of a proper explanation still escapes me, and commonalities or links have yet to be made in bodies of work that I have yet to create. I read a fantastic interview with the American abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski in the art magazine Turps Banana.

Everything he said in this interview harked back to the many questions I bring up when thinking about creative stimulus, trends within my work, questions of originality and style. Nozkowski's background is in the abstract expressionist movement in the 60s in New York (where he currently lives and works). Despite this solid foundation, however, he made a point to liberate himself from any strict rules to an aesthetic that could be associated to a trend or school of artists. He rebelled against large canvas work and shifted to small scale paper or panel. He strayed as long as he could from ever developing a style of his own, where he valued experimentation over a signature identity.

What he said about being a young artist was the most encouraging to me:

The hardest thing I have ever had to do as an artist is to become an older artist. I actually know how to make a Nozkowski now, and that can be a real trap. As a young artist, you don't know what you are capable of, you don't know where something is going to take you, you can succeed or you can fail. It's very exciting and it fills you with energy. Everything is an adventure.

I sometimes put a lot of pressure on myself for not having an apparent style that links all my work together. I don't even sign my work the same way all the time! This seems to be a common trap for a lot of younger artists, which can be distracting, and in fact, misleading. Individuality will come through no matter what. What the artist decides to use as a source for their work is what brings out the very nature of the artist themselves. Because "why would you look at one thing and not something else?"

People often ask, how do you know when a painting is finished? A painting is finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place. I am looking for the moment when I can say "I get it now".

Nozkowski also claims that art is, in fact, very personal to the artist, and that the meaning behind a piece of work can be translated in an entirely different way by the viewer. He learned long ago to accept this fact and not to let it affect the way he works.

The key experience for any artist in all the arts, is the solitariness of the studio, the thousands of hours we spend alone with our work. Time passes; we paint and watch this object grow. The most complex web of associations and connections develops from fleeting stuff to long skeins of connections. We remember things, reference ideas, imagine possibilities. There is so much that crosses our minds as we paint, so much I think it's folly to imagine another person being able to even come close to the richness we create for ourselves in our work. The only interesting meaning a work of art can have is that another human made it, another consciousness exists and that consciousness could imagine something so beautiful or so rich and complex...

The Furies Pursue Us

"Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us."

-From the novel Fury by Salman Rushdie, 2001

People have asked me before, and I have asked myself this too: what inspires me, or what motivates me to begin a piece? I find it difficult to give a straightforward answer. Mostly because I feel that my craft is still very much at its infancy, and that I am at the midst of experimentation and play (a state I doubt will ever end). Can I get away with saying "everything"? Probably not, because that doesn't do it for me either. There has to be some kind of hierarchy to the things that motivate me the most. And what propels me to pick up that pen or brush must surely possess some discriminatory power over other things that interest me - otherwise I'd be a mad woman trying to capture absolutely everything that sparks my interest.

My imagination has no limits, but I think what really gets the most "air time" in my work is an exploration of self. As vague as this may sound, and however many times we hear artists say this - art to me is The Personal. Unlike the Jeff Koons type approach, which is impersonal, I find myself hovering at the other end of this spectrum. I was drawn to Rushdie's concept of the Fury for this very reason.

To me, art is subjective. I can't help but weave myself into everything I create. Most of my paintings are done without much thought, but intuition - and what else could intuition be but some reflection of the self?

Supporting Other Blogs That Support Me

I was thrilled to see my work published on the online art mag AField. It is crucial that outlets such as the one Afield provides are available for all artists, emerging and established alike. The internet is drastically changing the way artists communicate their work and their accessibility to the public. New and innovative forms of marketing are being utilized in such a way that is inclusive and free for all (maybe not in all countries, but let's hope Google has enough clout to change things around).

I used to be a tad scared of web 2.0 and wasn't quite sold on the idea of blogging. Until, of course, I realized what a myopic view I had of the nature of communication itself, and that my fear was entirely unfounded and based on ignorance alone. As it turns out, this internet stuff isn't that hard at all! And it's provided me with such rich and diverse information, I can't imagine living without it now. Although, I have to say, there is a lot of crap in it too. One just has to figure out how to get what they need, and ignore the rest of it.

Everything is Illuminated by the Aura of Nostalgia

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."

- Milan Kundera

Nostalgia is a fascinating subject. From the Greek compound of "return" and "ache". An ache to return to a home that may or may not physically exist. An idealized form of a home much longed for. It's been a recurring theme in my thought process and in my writing. The sentiment is both comforting and destabilizing at the same time, because what it seeks to attain is in fact unattainable and only exists in the deepest caverns of one's being or imagination. It's like the dream that can never be realized. I'm really at a loss for words when it comes to describing what it means to me, nor am I a good enough writer to convey its deeper impressions on myself.

Most things we find extraordinarily beautiful and inspiring stirs the nostalgia within us. Images can heighten this sense; sounds, smells, tastes, touch - when all of our sensory faculties tingle and cry out with the familiarity of another existence or a belonging to something beyond our immediate perceptions. Memory is a different thing - it is our consciousness; where nostalgia seems to be of the subconscious.

What I associate to a memory, or how I remember something is where nostalgia can enhance or dilute its very nature. When I am creating, I try to tap into this subconscious void. At times when I am looking at a newly completed drawing or painting I think, "where the hell did that come from?" I like to believe that I had dug something up from another life. I'm not talking about reincarnation. Not at all. I'm talking about another impression of the same life that had stayed silent until that moment. And even then, the detail is still unclear and dream-like.

Invincible Plans

So far 2010 has been good to me (too early to tell?) Plans are starting to take some concrete form in my head, making sense not just to myself but to those I've shared them with (which is a good sign that I'm not deluding myself). I am beginning to feel invincible again, the muscle power of my imagination is pretty tangible right now. If only transcribing it down onto paper is as easy as scanning. Speaking of which, I was given the best Christmas present ever, which is my brand new Epson Stylus NX415. Cheap and simple, it's exactly what I need right now to get a move on with the more techy stuff, which I'll admit, I feel I am a generation behind on. I just learned how to properly use layers on Photoshop last week, so I obviously still have huge digital mountains to climb here. Of course, being more of a traditionalist, I don't plan to ever switch fully to digital. Analog is still the way to go if you want quality and substance over quantity and style.

I have been busy scanning in a lot of my free hand drawings (I'm sort of addicted to scanning now) in order to archive them digitally. But I haven't done much in the way of utilizing the scans to produce digital masterpieces. Further to an urgent need to produce more paintings, I still have a bunch of drawings to finish - let alone ideas that have yet to be fully realized before I can dedicate a chunk of my time to toiling over the computer.

Doodle the Devil Back to Hell

Liberia has been on my mind. It's been on everyone's mind for a while now - with Charles Taylor's ongoing trial in The Hague, the rise of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first female President in Africa, and the recent documentary film produced by Abigail Disney in 2008, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which tells the story of a group of courageous Liberian women fighting for peace in their country.

I've been a little fanatic about capturing quick ink illustrations of the devils of war and conflict. In this case, Charles Taylor.

Two Steps Forward and Maybe One Step Back

The New Year is about shedding old skin. Taking that mask off and confronting your demons. Turning over a new leaf. Giving it another go. Another chance. It is hope; it is change. But this doesn't come cheap.

This "new beginning" is always cloaked in some mystery though. Because the "how" is never as easy as the "why". I can think of plenty of reasons why things need changing; and what needs changing. But how to do it is another thing, and getting carried away by the symbolism of all that is new, and can be hoped for, can be very distracting from the actual doing, to make it all real in the end.

I like to keep it simple. I like to dream big but do small. I'd rather not have a quantitative metric for the changes I'd like to take place in the new year. No tally sheet; no checklist; no specific measurement for success; and no expectations.

There is something stirring within me though. And this is a good sign. As long as I am in motion and my trajectory is forward and not backward then I'm happy. Even if I do end up taking "two-steps-forward-one-step-back", I'm still moving forward in the long run. As long as my engine is running then I'm good. It's really where I get my fuel that would concern me the most.