2009 was fun, but I'm hoping that 2010 will be my most productive year as an artist. I'm planning to start a business and take a most serious step in life this year, and these two changes can work both ways on my productivity as an artist.
Before, I thought I am most creative during the lowest points in my life, but that was just because those where the times when I need most to express hurt, sadness or hopelessness to cope. The impulse to express was strongest then, and that more or less overcame the apprehension and hesitation to create because of lack of skills.
As I go along this creative path, I found that as I build on my skills, I could squeeze nice creations from happiness, with less and less apprehension.
For the painting-in-progress above, I'm having a ball trying to figure out how to render dried up grass in the foreground, as well as how to highlight the clouds. The cheeks and expression is still problematic and I don't want this painting to suffer the same fate as my juvenile works.
It's quite a small painting, and somehow, I'm regretting not painting this on a canvas 3 times it's current size. I would have loved working on the details of the distant towns in that scale.
For 2010, I'm planning to complete the following 11 paintings below. They are still in rough (rough may be an understatement) sketch form, but just to liven up your imagination, I've included the schematic sketches alongside completed works for 2009 below to give you an idea on how I might execute the plans.
I'm excited about starting work on the composition above. I'm so excited, I've come up with a name for it already: Manalmon.
The image above I want to execute as loosely as possible, but I've been wondering how I could do that while still rendering the tattoos "legibly".
When I visited Masbate, I came across a restaurant/bar that displayed these really tall paintings - somewhat 7x2 feet in dimension. I thought it looked so damn cool that I want to compose something like it. My subject here would be a male mountaineer with a hydration pack, heavily leaning on a large boulder, all sweaty and looking extremely tired, while the ridge leading up Mt. Guiting-Guiting rises up from behind him. Now, you gotta admit, that's freakin' cool! What better way to really point out that G2 is that precipitous, than to make a vertical composition of the ridge connecting Mayo's Peak with G2 itself.
Most everyone in Metro Manila have been "touched" one way or the other by Typhoon Ondoy. It's the stuff legends are made of. Cultural memories of the days when Metro East became submerged in muddy water, will linger long after those of us who have witnessed it are long gone from this world.
I plan to paint 3 paintings of Ondoy - two of them as seen from the hills of Antipolo. One is looking out at the Sumulong Highway vista. The other will be looking at Cainta and Laguna Lake shore from Village East III vista. The third painting will be of the muddy Marikina river as it snakes along San Mateo with the barren hills of Rodriguez in the background.
If you happen to sit beside me on the plane going to Palawan, you'd probably think it was the first time I'd ridden a plane, seeing how avidly I am photographing clouds through the plane's little windows.
If you happen to see what I saw at that moment, you'd probably take your camera out as well. The photographs did not reproduce the sight I saw...but I hope these future paintings will.
I was looking at this large space in our house and was wondering what would look good on it. So I imagines this restricted palette painting of a nude man on one extreme side of a painting and a nude woman on the opposite extreme side of the frame. For lack of an appropriate title for it, I've decided to christen it: Dingdong and Clam.
I came up with this triptych composition mid year of 2009. I plan to work on this during the campaign period. That should put things in perspective.
Well, that's it. I hope I get to do all these for 2010!
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