Drawing, painting, and works in progress

I’ve started a painting practice recently. By recent, I mean July 4th, 2023. The fact that this falls on Independence Day and I was at that moment visiting America, staying with family in the suburbs of Columbus Ohio, is all happenstance. For the past few years, I’ve been spending a few months there, playing with clay at my in-laws ceramic studios and taking long walks along the many trails and parks that meander along the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers.

But this summer felt different. For the first time, I felt a great wave of homesickness. I missed my home in Manila, my home of 7 years now. Since moving back to Manila, I’ve struggled to balance this feeling of engagement and estrangement. On that afternoon on July 4th, as friends and family were preparing their grills to cook burgers outside and purchasing fireworks for the night’s festivities, I sat down at the kitchen table and using the basic tools of an artist, I picked up a pencil and a sketchpad, and started to make marks.

Drawing is not foreign to me. I am the product of years of art school. Yet, the education I received in order to be an artist had the opposite effect. After art school, I stopped making art altogether. I was afraid to draw and paint. The history of art, specifically the history of painting, felt so masculine and Western, and too large and out of my reach. When I returned to my own art practice, I described my laser-carved cardboard work as a subversive practice, yet I called them paintings nonetheless.

The works that begun were made en plein-air, right outside the ceramic studio while I waited for the kiln to cool after a glaze fire, or with artist friends at the residency in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was inspired by my environment. The sketchbook was a way to develop and work through ideas, emotions, and whatever else I was dealing with internally. In a sense, it is my personal journal.