Gunning for GSIS

I've finally remembered that there is such a thing as a GSIS Art Competition and the due date for this year's competition hasn't passed yet.

The theme is “Makabagong Kinabukasan” (A New Kind of Future).

I have been contemplating a particular composition, but not for the theme above. However, having a theme allowed me to crystallized the work in my head in no time, and led me in this direction. The moment my lead touched paper, all the elements came together without a fuss. I was pretty amused by the speed in which I arranged my elements.

I wanted to show a landscape of haphazardly built structures – a squatter roofscape. It has come to symbolize in my head everything that has gone wrong with the Philippines. It is a patchwork of temporary and flimsy attempts to build a community. It serves it's purpose marginally, but it simply is wanting of so many things: justice, order, direction.

I didn't want to show a living person amid the squalor. You will not see a single Filipino in the picture because this landscape is not Filipino. It is not what we are. It is just a predicament we have found ourselves in. It is a mere situation. There is even what appears to be a classical structure of sorts, but you will find it almost built over by the corrugated sheet iron structures surrounding it. A person should wonder what else is underneath all that rusted corrugated iron sheets. Will it reveal our true selves?

The only human form in the roofscape is the image of a construction worker wielding a sledgehammer in a tarpaulin banner. I'm just suggesting it, but in my opinion, the only way to move forward is to rid ourselves of things we have become comfortable with. We have been so used to the dysfunctions, that we are bewildered by reactions of visitors to our shores.

I gave the painting horizon gaps which should make the viewer feel that beyond the roofs, is a large open space - perhaps a beach of sorts. You should notice that the sky seems overly “nice” for the scene at the foreground. I just what the viewer to see my idea of hope. Beyond all that mess, is what we've all been working for. We just have to wield that sledgehammer with the conviction that it will demand.

The image above is about 60% complete.  It's not that easy to render rusted corrugated iron sheets without making it look like an absolute mess. 

This is my first painting after a year's hiatus!  Rock climbing had messed up my hands.  I can't control them as well as before.  It forced me to feather my brush strokes and I am mystified by the results.

UPDATE:

The new GSIS Painting Competition size requirement is 4 feet by 5 feet.  Last year it was 3x4 and I assumed wrong or perhaps read wrong.  I will not have any entry this year.  What a let down.

Now that the theme doesn't apply anymore, I feel that I may have to rethink the elements in my frame and go back to my original concept of having a thin kid balancing on the rooftops - a play on juxtaposition.

What's that?

Do you know what this is?

  

Not my finger!  I was talking about what I was pointing at.  Yup.  A blank canvas.  And I have two for that matter.

I had the frames for these custom-made by Sunga.  Cost me a thousand pesos for the two.  A bit pricey, but I can't really complain given the weight of the wood and the quality of the workmanship.  I use to make my own frames but my skills in carpentry can't overcome my usual problems: warping, usual flimsy construction and the ever annoying trapezoidal shape I end up with.

We're trying to work out a solution to bring down the price of the frame.  Some of the cheaper wood are just not workable as frames.  I told the people at Sunga if they can bring my 3x4s to P300, then we're dandy.

Yes, I do my own stretching, priming, sanding and whatever else that is necessary to come up with a nice consistent bite on the surface.  I think of it as part of the creative process.  Before you can paint anything, you have to create space for your other creations to exist in.

Wonder what's going to be pulled out of the air and plastered on these white surfaces?  Well, do come back every now and then to find out.  One of them is due on May 7!  I may have to use those spray on varnish for that.  Damn!

Devoid of a Center

There was a piece of heavy paper lying around, and I can't get myself to sleep just yet.  When worries and woes numb the mind, I really appreciate regressing into momentary peace that working on a simple piece such as this affords me.  It has no center, and nothing is really defined.  Anything more is just added burden that I don't need.

Ortigas
10.25 x 7.75 in
Oil Pastel on Paper

Hitting the Pavement Running

There was no sense in prolonging this hiatus from art which I found myself stuck in.  Come to think of it, these past couple of weeks I've been going over in my head works which I am yet to do.  Also, it is hard not to think about art after coming back from Batanes last weekend.  There, the medium that was at my disposal was photography.  It was a perfect medium to capture the fickleness and dynamism of the landscape - it was a landscape in flux!

I've decided to work on this image I had sketched out for quite some time, just to get me back into rhythm.  I told myself to use the plate to just loosen up - no expectations, no direction.  I just wanted to shake off the cobwebs.

Pilipit
Oil Pastel on Paper
12x15 inches
Unmounted

I've been rock and wall climbing these past few months - since November actually.  I've always had reservations in that the activity might affect the tactile feelings on my fingers. It does, apparently.

I find my hands less nimble, working on this sketch.  I don't think it was because I haven't held a brush for more than a year.  The brush still felt the same, and after a few minutes on this work, I felt I was back into it.  But my strokes felt more forced - there is too much jerkiness at the end of every movement.  I knew what I wanted to do with my hands, but all the movements seem exaggerated.

I don't know how all this will play out when I start painting with oils again.

Surprises and Karma

I had an interesting talk with a friend this week.

In it, I found out she got married in a civil wedding early this October.  I was mystified by the announcement... wait, let me rephrase that... I was shocked at her announcement.  One moment, you think you know the person, and then suddenly you're facing someone with a stranger's surname.

In any case, our conversation digressed at the ills we've done others.  I guess the moment crystallized my thoughts, and I said though I was atheist, it seems I have always unconsciously deferred to the will of the Universe and accepted Karma as its means to exact justice for all the times we've caused bad things to happen to others.  The line of thinking would be, "I'm suffering now because I deserve it", or "I should cease to feel guilty because I've been punished for it already".  It's truly satisfying to live in delusion sometimes - to think forces greater than ourselves are at play to harmonize and right the wrongs we have done, or to put back in balance what we have tipped over.

A realization did come by my way.  The Universe is amoral.  Isn't justice just a construct of our minds as it struggles with logic and the tempering effects of empathy?  No one is out there keeping tabs of our good deeds, or bad deeds at that.

Karma seems meaningful only in retrospect; a convenient means to ease our guilt.

Come to think of it, the guilt I carry was never lightened by the harm and ill done to me  by others.  The hurt I've felt never did ease the guilt of the hurt I dispensed on others.  My betrayal never did cancel out the betrayal done to me.  It all turns out to be one complex and confounding network of hurt and pain we've all weaved to entangle each and everyone of us in.

As we age, they say we grow in wisdom.  I say, we entangle ourselves so much from all the things we've done in our early years that we can barely move anymore.  That is ageing.  One day, you'd rather stay in your chair all day than to spin more of your caustic web into the world and its inhabitants.

There really is wisdom in the adage of forgiving and forgetting.  Life can be a real bummer if you are lugging around a bag of guilt everywhere you go - like some forlorn Santa Claus.

To my friend down there in the south, I wish you blissful happiness.

What is worse than a tormented artist?

What is worse than a tormented artist?

Well, to be simply tormented.

...

I've come to realize a long time ago, that I've developed this psychological mechanism whereby to ease the impact of my seasonal depression on my daily life, I'd focus its manifestation on something else - usually something and sometimes someone that is dear to me.  I'd aim hate, annoyance, rejection and some dark destructive fantasies on these objects or people, even as I go along humming normally through my daily routines.

I'm aware of this mechanism, and I allow it to play out, because it does allow me to function through such bouts of momentary unreasonableness.  Besides, what damage can thoughts do, especially if you are aware that is is purely hypothetical and therapeutic?

But as of late, I've found myself seemingly unencumbered by such bouts.  It's like noticing you haven't gotten your credit card bills for the month, even though you'd love not to receive them at all.

Something is not right here.  There is something I still have to resolve but have not identified yet.

Then, I remembered this ongoing avoidance I've been acting out with regards these unfinished canvasses I have.  In introspect, this game of avoidance has been hurting me quite well - a bit like a sort of self imposed punishment. It is exactly what I'd do to cope with my seasonal bouts, but I am not aware of it.

If I'm not mistaken, the reason I haven't felt depressed as of late is because I'm already stuck in a perpetual cycle of feeling depressed and coping which feeds each other so well that they perpetuate themselves.

I need to snap out of this comfortable spiral into perdition.  I need to paint.  Even if it's worth shit, I need to paint it out of the canvas.

There's a Time for Everything

When the 2010 Campaign Season started, I was ecstatic at all the possibilities that the experience will present me.  I readied my sketchbook and promised myself to keep my camera nearby just in case a piece of inspiration do come my way.

But as soon as the feverish pace of Philippine campaign season got under way, did I find myself  bogged down with tasks and the need to create art took a back seat.

I think I packed away the artist in me too well.  I find it difficult to even start sketching now - and that's halfway through the year.  Somewhere along the way, I think I left the artist in me wallowing in some perennially flooded back road in Malabon City.

Come to think of it, I don't even bother bringing my camera when I go on trips.  Just this weekend, I left home for Tarak Ridge in the Mariveles Range, Bataan, without a camera.  And interestingly, it didn't bother me one bit.  A year ago, I'd find that thought reprehensible.

There's this growing annoyance when I see these brushes and tube paints in my living room.  I feel this itch to finally pack them away.  It's the same feeling I got when I had this compulsion to pack away my Transformer toys when I was a boy, that had outgrown his toys.  As with the toys, the paint brushes embarrass me.

I think there is a need for me to rid myself of all these distractions.  I need to set up a company and these brushes do nothing but clutter my thoughts.

Perhaps it's now time to pack away these last vestiges of my creative past.