2016's Christmas card loot

The season's over, and I have to stash away my increasingly paltry collection of hard-copy Christmas cards. In my computer hard drive and Google Drive, I've saved the letters and cards sent by email.

I sent out over 20 cards and postcards by what's known as "happy mail," complete with stamps, as early as the first week of December. The addressees acknowledged my letters by email and text. I'm almost tempted to enclose a SASE, remember those? SASE stands for self-addressed stamped envelope.

Handwriting allows me to slow down. I guess it also brings down my blood pressure. It calms me. I'm able to reflect, rue, remember, regret, rejoice on paper. Not unlike keeping a journal only this time there is someone at the other end of the conversation. A friend asked me to send her a private message via her Facebook, which is faster, because she's "poor in snail mail." I assured her that sending mail by snail or donkey delights me so much so she needn't worry if my message is delayed by a week, 10 days or a month. She lives over in Western Australia and comes home twice a year at the most.

Here's the last year's mail, the last hand-delivered by the sister concerned.

Handmade's the best. This one's the handiwork of three-year-old Sophia, daughter of Liwa Araos and Archie Espanola. Made of dried leaves and shiny stickers. I like Liwa's penmanship--it indicates her lightness of being and overall cheerfulness.

Cousin Tess Lolarga Romero in Chicago is religious about her cards. They arrive as early as November. Perhaps she knows my husband is a stamp collector so she sticks assorted stamps on the envelop.

Beth Quirino Lahoz, president of the Technological Institute of the Philippines, unfailingly sends a yearly card. Sometimes, when I respond in kind, she emails quickly back upon receiving my card: "Despite the distance (not seeing each other), the connection thrives because you have also worked at it with your gracious letters."

Coming home from Baguio via Subic on New Year's Day, I found this on my desk--a card from my sister Gigi and inside were crisp 20-peso bills. She and our adopted sister Ruth Terania know my prepaid phone's limits and how I direly need the gadget for text blasts when supporting assorted causes. Thanks, baby sisters.

Strength

"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind..."
--William Wordsworth

Photo from the Facebook page of LIWA ARAOS

'Moonlight and Water': A Quartet of Voices

In their first simultaneous solo exhibitions at this new alternative art space Kiss the Cook Gourmet, Norman Chow, Merci Javier Dulawan, Babeth Lolarga and Baboo Mondoñedo work on a theme that inspires them to be playful and reflective at the same time.

While watercolor in the hands of Mondoñedo and Dulawan effectively conveys the theme’s subtlety and frailty, Chow and Lolarga use the vivid, vibrant colors of their media to express themselves.

The watercolors, the acrylic works and the illustrations in dry media of pastels and color pencils were produced during a prolonged season of drought. The dry spell was outside, there in the visible world. In the visual artists’ interior lives, the flow of imaginings was strong.

They worked on varied surfaces in different locations (Baguio, Metro Manila, the Visayas), guided by images of water, with its implied power to renew life or produce a good harvest, and of the earth’s closest neighbor, with its own capacity to pull the tides and affect human emotions and states of mind.

Their own research enabled them to visualize images of moon and water. For example, the lizard, symbol of regeneration and almost a cliché in ethnic-inspired works, is said to appear in lowland provinces in the rare colors of pink and white. When it does, it is a harbinger of rain.

Some chose to interpret aphorisms in English and Filipino from “Baying at the Moon” to “Blue Moon” to “Suntok sa Buwan.” By celestial coincidence, a crescent moon was visible in parts of Southeast Asia one evening in mid-May this year. The planet Venus seemed to be held in the cup of the moon’s palm. This rare sight, in folklore, also signals good fortune.

Four persons face the vastness of the oceans and the heavens and humbly resize and reduce this on paper, canvas and board—a fortuitous beginning for all.


"Moonlight and Water" is the inaugural exhibit at the expanded Kiss the Cook Gourmet, a restaurant, delicatessen and gallery in one. The show, curated by Liwa Araos, opens on June 12 and runs till July 9. Kiss the Cook Gourmet, located at 65 Maginhawa street, UP Village, Quezon City, opens daily at 11 a.m.

‘Oh, My Señorita, Sweet Sweet Lady’: The Story Behind the Painting

Sometime in February this year, my youngest of four sisters, Gigi Lolarga (poker nut to me, Eugenia Celerina D. Lolarga in her birth certificate), asked me, her ate, what my birthday gift was for her. Normally, I’d pull something out of my thin wallet. But that day, all I could promise her was a portrait of Bruno Lolarga, her “son.”

The image of the playful pug Brunski stayed in my mind like an old refrain, so to speak. When friends like Brenda V. Fajardo, my former professor in modern art in the mid-1970s (gosh, this really dates me) fell seriously ill followed by Rey Rimando, math prof at UP Baguio and my children’s math tutor who made them less fearful of numbers (his aneurysm struck on Valentine week) and Noel Cuizon (a nephew of Brenda’s, by the way), there was no way my earnings as a freelance writer would contribute anything of significance to the cost of their operations, recuperation, follow-up with medical specialists, rehabilitation, etc.

By this time I was keeping mind, breaking heart and sometimes unsteady hands busy by painting in preparation for a solo show at Taumbayan bar-bistro.

I texted my exhibit proposal to Joel Saracho, former colleague from Manila Standard days and manager-partner of the bar, who was on a video shoot in Bukidnon, but he managed to reply, “That’s so Taumbayan,” meaning he approved of my contrasting blings with canned goods and instant noodles.

Summer of last year, he invited me to exhibit there when it was just a few months old. Since then, the place has been a night owl’s hub for the theater and television people who keep odd (a.k.a. vampire ) hours. I felt right at home that first time there with Gou de Jesus and Ernie Enriquez.

Someone was having a birthday then—Augie Rivera, if my blinking memory is working right. We were complete strangers to one another but were quickly introduced. Like any hospitable birthday celebrator, he asked me to partake of his feast. Un-shy when faced with a rectangular slab of Estrel’s caramel cake, I cut a generous slice complete with rosebud-shaped icing. Talk of feel at home. I always like to use William Saroyan’s title for his book “My Kind of Crazy, Wonderful People” in situations like this.

To shorten this narration, one day in March this year I posted a picture of Bruno on my Facebook profile and stated that I intended to paint a portrait of him paired with a snooty señorita. The images of him with a lady were up there, still vague. Actor Frances Makil Ignacio, Nitz to those who know her, volunteered in her comment to be the model. I asked permission if I could scour her photos posted in her profile to guide me.

I zeroed in on Frances in a black and white polka dotted dress, which turned out to be her costume for her role as Lucy Brown in “Threepenny Opera” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Well, as Ka Universe (Gilda Cordero Fernando) likes to say, the universe has a way of stitching things together. Even Gou, freelance writer-editor by day, occasional jazz singer by night, gave the bright suggestion of singing our friends to health. An art auction with songs to up the bids--brilliant, Gou!

Meanwhile, I couldn’t think in my regular format of 16” x 20” anymore. This tribute to Bruno, his master Gigi, Frances, etc. had to be BIG to be worth anything if it were to be auctioned off to benefit the sick. So I thought big: four feet by four feet canvas on board. My private art teacher Norman Chow had to repeat the request to ensure he was reading his SMS right. Yes, I texted back, four feet by four feet and make it an order for two canvases.

“Stormy Norman,” our private nickname for him, had his carpenter in Baguio execute the specs up to the stretching and priming of canvases. With paint and brushes ready and the managing of minor assorted household crises in Baguio and Pasig not bothering me any longer, I applied myself the way my other teacher, Jerry Araos, told me how at the greenhouse of Oscar and Toottee Pacis in Happy Homes.

Norman guided me all the way, recruiting his son Chino, a computer science major who paints on the side, to help. Chino was a study in coolness while Norman and I mismatched colors, hues and tints, he scratching his bald head, me scratching what was left of my head of hair. On learning that Chino was the third pair of hands in the endeavor, Toottee, who was then in Manila attending a valedictorian grandchild’s graduation, texted: “I hope Chino knows what he’s in for.”

We will see what we’re all in for when “Oh, My Señorita, Sweet Sweet Lady” goes up for auction at an opening bid of P8,000 early this evening, April 9, at Taumbayan, 40 T. Gener and K-1 streets, Kamuning, Quezon City.

Belated happy birthday, baby sis Gi. Sorry the painting of Bruno will find a new owner. Just the same, the real deal will always be with us.

Photo of re-tooled, revised "Oh, My Señorita, Sweet Sweet Lady" by LIWA ARAOS, exhibit curator

Bling Blings & Lucky Me

Soon to be seen at Taumbayan Bar-Bistro are a baker's dozen of paintings. Following is my statement on the show"Bling Blings & Lucky Me." Exhibition runs from April 9 to May 8. Regular Taumbayan hours are from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. The place is at 40 T. Gener and K-1 streets, Kamuning, Quezon City.

______________________________

“Bling Blings & Lucky Me”

Using her preferred medium of acrylic on canvas or paper canvas, Babeth Lolarga explores in her third solo exhibition of paintings the subject of the Pinoy’s obsession with brand names and accessorizing. She contrasts this against the majority’s diet of rice and fish and, in the absence of the first two items, instant noodles.

Mixing colors to approach oil’s qualities of opacity and luminescence, she lays on her statements thick and fast—thick because acrylic can have a texture that is tempting to touch and fast because it is a quick-dry medium suitable to a temperament that demands immediate results at the end of each working day.

The manipulated lack of a clear figure-ground relationship and the use of rudimentary, child-like colors project the subject’s image into a shrill visual scream.

The scream grows louder as she moves from her canvasette to two large-scale works.

In “Chief to Chief,” her last, long drawn-out scream in this show, she uses her life partner’s photographic image taken beside a figure of an Indian chief. In Baguio, he heads a newspaper’s Northern Luzon bureau, a role that is relevant.

The seemingly irrelevant red Indian leader has bearing in the woodcarving village of Asin, Benguet, which is also in his area of responsibility. There the carvers produce images of Indian chiefs mainly for export to craft stores in the United States located near Indian reservations. Said carvings are passed off as products of indigenous Americans. And so it goes for kangaroos passed off as made by Maoris in Australia, lions in Africa, laughing Buddhas in Taiwan, etc.

Although the painter’s choice of subjects may be a feeble, almost lonesome way of shaking a fist at the world, “Bling Blings & Lucky Me” has given her another way of improvisational ranting and emotional release.


April 2010
Quezon City

Photo shows "Chief to Chief," an acrylic painting on canvas board measuring 4 feet x 4 feet, a collaborative work of Babeth Lolarga and Chino Severo Chow, 2010. Photo by LIWA ARAOS