I have heard it said that paintings are an imprint of the artist’s soul. Each day that I spend marrying pigment to brush on canvas or panel gives credence to this view. It almost feels like a moving and active meditation, a time for the soul’s communion with its experience of reality, translated thoughtfully onto the painting. Long and tedious work on challenge areas eventually reward me with unexpected breakthroughs, preceded by my own heart racing as I paint angles and values with bated breath, to visibly convincing positions. At last, her foot appears mid-stride. This was my most recent and significant breakthrough.

Although I am convinced that painting is my vocation in life, I am grateful for the day job that I enjoy very much. It keeps me balanced and supports my art. It allows me to aspire towards paintings that represent an inner eternal flame for beauty, truth and meaning beyond the tangible and the daily routine. My hope is for others to view these works, these so-called imprints, and to derive joy and substance from what I have seen and felt in life, so far. I agree that art happens as the work unfolds from within the artist and just as meaningfully, art happens when the viewer is engaged and the work evokes an awareness for the substantial in his life. I seek to bring joy this way.

Each work is a gift from a heart that burns within; from a heart filled with gratitude for the gift that it can never fully deserve but can only render in faith, for others.

“Five loaves and two fish”.  To me, these five words are another way of saying, show up for your life and give it your best shot.  We often keep our dreams and intentions on hold while we wait for what we believe are sure signs of success in our endeavors. Sometimes, the signs appear like a writing on the wall. Sometimes, we do not recognize the signs and so we don’t give our dreams a shot at becoming reality. What has worked for me, so far, is to give whatever I have,  e.g. “five loaves and two fish”, towards my aspirations and unfailingly, life has multiplied my offering, sometimes way beyond my own imaginings.

I am now working on a painting with walking figures in the foreground and my greatest challenge by far is how to get my subjects to emit the striding stance that they have in reality.  Who knew that painting walking feet would be so difficult?

Three hours of scumbling, smudging and smoothing and I still can’t get my angles in the right perspective.  Sigh. Her feet will have to wait another day, I tell myself, as I  wash my paintbrush clean and think of my life’s other currencies, e.g. work deadlines and household chores.  Still, I think  about all my hard-won triumphs on canvas and I resolve to be earnest in my daily offering of “five loaves and two fish” and give thanks that I have something to offer.  Tomorrow, I will show up for my life as I have today. I will come closer to painting her feet as accurately as I see it, e.g. walking mid-stride on cobbled streets on market day.  This work will come to fruition and will give joy to its viewer.  This work will cause a multiplication in my daily offering.  When this painting is finished, my life will gain far more than my own imaginings when the work began as a mere intention, when it significance was a mere contemplation.  My heart shall be content and will  once again rejoice for the baskets of blessings left over from the offering of five loaves and two fish.

It all began in early 2012, 23 years after I had left Art School to pursue a course in business because I did not feel I was ever going to be good enough in my art. I was on a wild and expensive whim — I learned that the Musee D’Orsay Paris was loaning out its Impressionist Works to the National Museum of Singapore— it was a prospect too decadent to refuse. So I packed my bags and went away for the weekend, with best friend in tow —- who else goes on a wild whim, guilt-free and spontaneous but your trusty friend who has tagged you along on her own versions of the wild side? So we booked a two night stay at the nearest hotel to the Museum and went on the adventure that changed our lives forever — and changed for the better, I must say.

It was the last weekend of the Exhibit in Singapore during our visit. We went to see the works on each day that we were there but it was that visit on the last day that charted me towards a path that I had secretly hoped would be mine again, though it was inconceivable to imagine how. I was up early on the last day and started for the Museum straight after breakfast. Naturally, I was the first guest that day. Entrance was free on that last day, an auspicious sign, unbeknownst to me. The Exhibit guard, thinking it was my first time to see the Show, met me at the entrance and spoke to me in Chinese, motioning for me to follow her through the maze of Impressionist works —– we passed Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Degas, Bonnard, Rousseau, Cezanne and all the Impressionist Masters on the way to the non-Impressionist in the group, the one she was most proud to present to me. “Van Gogh…”, she said and smiled as she faded into the maze of panels, half-lit, encased in a soft silence, much like the break of dawn hinting at the rise of a new day.

So I sat before “Starry Night Over The Rhone” in solitude, the eerie silence around me falling away into irrelevance. I sat there in silence. Cobalt blues and gentle grays for the sky and glowing yellows for the stars. Lovers walking in faint darkness and two boats by the bank, parked for the night. Each stroke sure and resolute. Breathtaking. Celestial. And somewhere in that solitude, I felt it —- “When are you coming back?” the words pierced through my heart, in the exact same way that my soul felt seen, seen and stoked by a work birthed more than a century ago, by someone I only knew of from books and Don McLean’s famous, “Starry, starry night…”. I sat for awhile more and began to rationalize all that I had heard and felt, in my heart and in my soul, just as other visitors started pouring in. I realized that I was gifted with a moment of intimacy that was fleeting but powerful. Surely, I needed some air so I could attempt to make sense of it all, as I had been trained in business school —- to find the story (behind the numbers) and then form a view. I formed a view, but the story did not seem to make logical sense.

I went home to Manila and found myself strangely resolute about touching base with a lady who holds painting sessions in her gallery in Alabang. Her daughter’s works had enchanted me since 2005 and I was drawn to their path. Today they are both my teachers and mentors, in art and just as importantly, in life. Like love, art is lovelier, the second time around.

I had researched more on Van Gogh’s life and works and got more acquainted with the story behind Don McLean’s “Vincent”. The lyrics are beautiful and filled with meaning, especially “frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can’t forget”….these were meant to reference the way Van Gogh’s paintings outlived him, each one a channel through which the artist continues to watch the world that he loved and can’t forget. This must have been the reason why I felt Starry Night pierced through my soul, watching me in a way I could never forget on that auspicious day.

As I drove from the Gallery on that Saturday in March 2012, the first of many that I would spend painting in the Gallery, I switched the radio on to a very unexpected sign —- “Starry, starry night….paint your palette blue and gray…” It was my writing on the wall, so to speak —- from what seemed like a wild and decadent whim in the company of the Impressionist Masters, I had found my way back to the path that called to me from a distant past. Starry Night pointed me back to my way home.

A mentor once told me, “Art opens many joys in your life that were hidden before – both inside you and outside you.” And this, by far rings true in my life in a way that humbles me and makes it possible for me to understand what it means to be grateful, everyday for everything. Not to say that I am spared from heartache or self-doubt because art has not dulled my senses to life’s imperfections. Art simply keeps nudging me towards positivity and this, I believe, is how it opens many joys within. And as within, so without.

I am preparing for a group show in July this year —- a stint that reflects my secret longing to share the beauty and mystery of places that have touched my soul in the hope that these pieces would inspire joy and hope and positivity. Each piece is a gift to those who would receive it. Each work is a child of my heart, birthed into the world for those whose lives, like mine, were changed by beauty, not only for the better, but more certainly, for good.

P.S. Exhibit details to follow soon. I’ll be seeing you! In the meantime, sharing with you a view of The Vltava and Charles Bridge against the Prague Castle in “Prague at Dusk”