Aze Ong's light, healing touch and crochet art

The last time I saw crochet artist Aze Ong, she was leading guests, mainly students and teachers, in a dance at the opening of the group exhibition called "Lima-lima" at the San Beda Museum in Alabang Hill in December last year.

She let the audience hold her "instruments" or wear her creations. I haven't quite forgotten that because pictures of that evening help me remember. I've also stored some of her words in my files.

That's Aze at left beating a rhythm with her hands as teachers let go

Aze once went through what she calls her "lost" period. It's nothing unusual for artists and writers. She went to Bukidnon during that period to do volunteer work so she could try living away from her comfort zone and her family. That period taught her resourcefulness and the ability to listen to the silence within and without. She lived atop a hill with a view of mountains, trees, vegetation. Sometimes she saw eagles. Wild sunflowers grew and thrived in the cool climate.

Living with the Talaandig tribe also made her see that "art and life flow together, that art is life seen in the rituals for harvesting, their marriage rites and birthdays. Dancing and singing--it's a way of life."

After processing that whole experience, one day she finally saw the light. She realized that she didn't  have to belong to a tribe to make art or to perform. She said, "I just follow my instincts and do it. This [immersion]  is an experience I always go back to and share with others. That sharing of yourself to others is the best gift you can give to them.This made me realize the beauty in imperfection. There is no perfect world, no perfect people. Imperfection makes it perfect!"

Her works bring to mind the colors of butterfly wings or what one imagines to be colors of angel wings. It's no coincidence that Aze believes that wings are the symbols of freedom. She says, "When we are enlightened, we are free."

Woman shakes an Aze-made percussion instrument.

Aze, the woman in purple, with fellow travelers and seekers. On the left wall are framed paper cuts of Sinag de Leon who's holding a papier mache horse (called taka in Laguna) with a decopage of her paper cuts.

Forest hugger Kay Malilong Isberto

The lawyer who paints to raise consciousness about our dwindling forest cover with her "Bantay Gubat" series

Now here’s a lawyer who makes that litigious profession shine: Kay Malilong Isberto. By continuing to make trees and forests the subjects of her paintings (she recently held a solo show at San Beda Museum in Alabang Hills, Muntinlupa City), Isberto is able to promote a passionate advocacy to overhaul Philippine forestry laws.

“I never thought of abandoning law [to be a full-time painter]. Painting was just another way [of expression] that if words did not work, maybe pictures will,” she said.

Last year, she met another visual artist, Aze Ong, while she was setting up for a solo exhibit at Likha Diwa in the UP Diliman campus. Ong asked her if she wanted to exhibit in another venue.  Her exhibit then at Likha Diwa was entitled “Rainforest Caravan.”

Without hesitating or even considering her load as lawyer and mother to young children, she immediately said “Yes!” without knowing where the venue was (in far-flung Alabang).

"Abundance 3",

8 x 10 inches, acrylic on canvas

She explained that she wanted to bring her forest advocacy to a wider audience. She submitted an exhibit proposal to San Beda Museum curator Joseph Renta. He challenged her, saying  that she just had a month to get ready.

She didn’t panic; instead, she focused on painting “until I felt I had enough to tell the story of the Rainforest Caravan. I painted as soon as I woke up and painted at least eight hours a day for the next found weeks. It helped that acrylic dries fast.”

Isberto, 38, who has degrees in economics and law from UP Diliman, had always been keen on the arts. She took an art workshop at age13 in Cebu under Meowix Flores, then another one at 17 that was run by fine arts students of UP Cebu. When her son took art classes under Mimsy Sermonia Jundis in 2008, she did some of the exercises that the workshop teacher gave him. The young mom also had a few drawing classes with Jundis.

This persistently studious woman was already working on her masters in art history, also at UP Diliman, but temporarily stopped when she got pregnant with her second baby in 2010.

As for her deep concern for the country’s dwindling forest cover, she said, “I worked on a project to amend the Philippine Forestry Code. I learned that our forest cover is estimated at 21 percent when the ideal should be at least 45percent or for some scientists, 54 percent. When I think about the implications of that for the future in terms of availability of clean air and water, biodiversity, prevention of landslides and the threats from climate change, I realized that we have to work fast to change paradigms about the forest and to act accordingly.”

While she worked on that draft bill, she realized that “the idea that the forest is valuable in itself, not merely as a source of timber, is abstract for a lot of people. It is so different from the attitude of indigenous peoples, the same attitude that chroniclers wrote about when the Spanish colonizers arrived here.”

"Orange Gypsy Dancer",

18 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas

She added, “There was reverence and love for the forest. I thought that I should depict what the Philippines would look like if we found that love for the forest again. I imagined a Rainforest Caravan moving across the country. Through this, we could connect the forests and forest communities in the Philippines, share stories about them, including best practices on taking care of them, the hopes and dreams of communities taking care of them, and find ways for people in urban areas, even abroad, to help with forest conservation. Helping a forest community send children to school, for example, is one way to do that. When we make the lives of people taking care of the forest easier, we indirectly help take care of the forest.”

Isberto considered herself lucky because her husband Dominic is very supportive. “He not only buys my art materials, he gives me space and time for my forest advocacy and art,” she revealed.

Her  teenage son Francis Ruben critiques her work. “He and my toddler Leandro are daily reminders that I need to keep going on my forest advocacy,” she said.

She seizes opportunities “to tell the story of the forest and of the need to take better care of it.” The recent show at the museum was meaningful for her because she was able to reach more children and young people.

She said, “It is their future at stake. I want them to enjoy the ecosystem services that forests provide. If I can convince them of how important it is to love our forests and to take care of them, maybe they can influence the adults in their lives to act differently.”--Text and photos by ELIZABETH LOLARGA

First uploaded by Vera Files / Yahoo Philippines, Jan. 12, 2013.

25 random things about myself

Silly hats: Barney the purple dinosaur has a song about a silly hat. It was my niece Bianca's fave (she with the angel wings), and now it's the favorite of my apo, Kai/Butones, the most photographed and blogged baby in Baguio. In photo are (seated from left): Babeth Lolarga and Marga Susi. Behind them are Kimi Fernandez and Suzy Lolarga.

Tim Tomlinson, one of the co-authors of The Portable MFA in Creative Writing (Writer's Digest Books), recommended this writing exercise at the Read Lit District: Third Philippine International Literary Festival at the Ayala Museum in Makati City. The New York Writers Workshop helped put together this manual, the only term I can call it, to help those entranced by The Word "to improve (their) craft with the core results taught to MFA students."

Tomlinson's point was that this exercise could be an entry point for future projects, whether they be a poem, essay, novel, play, etc.

 I wrote this exercise at the crack of dawn.

1. I write at least 600-800 words a day, excluding sharing links in Google+ and Twitter.

2. I dislike persons who are unfair to people who work WITH them, not FOR them, then going about their merry little way using group, company or public funds for unofficial business, e.g., company car for private vacations to my personally beloved places like Baguio. Moreso, I disdain women tied to men announcing within hearing distance of employees that why can't her husband, a pipsqueak of an executive in a nationwide company, find a big enough, bright enough hotel suite for her when the company pays him a grand amount? 

Another variation of my pet peeve is watching ambitious, social-climbing persons who cunningly disguise their true motives by invoking Marxist-Leninist-Maoist words so they can steal others' works and others' ideas outright without so much as a by your leave because these sensitively confidential documents pertain to  women who had underwent spousal abuse in various permutations. Whatever they steal, these particular persons justify their act by saying that they are also  part of the , ahem, working class (sound of blogger dry retching at this point).

3. I also have a strong personal dislike for private entrepreneurs of so-called organic stores (beware of health food freaks who are worse than holier-than-thou Bible thumpers) who get some of their supplies from the countryside through connections like state universities and colleges and because of their national stature are able to extort/extract for their stores, or for their provincial rest house, the harvest of others like vegetables, fruits, tree saplings, decorative flower and indoor plants, dairy products, virgin coconut oil, for free or at wholesale prices that leave producers, especially farmers, gritting their teeth and smiling with forced gladness at couples like this.

4. Enough of dislikes and nega-trons (fresh word for people reeking with negativity). Let's move on to the things that I am ceaselessly grateful for. I like how my 28-year marriage has more than endured its trials--it has lasted and worked out in the true sense of "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health" because my partner, not in crime but in shared ideals, and I chose to live geographically apart most of the time so I can work, even at minimum wage level, to keep what's left of my dignity intact. Sometimes though, I have to stretch out, in the spirit of a Buddhist nun's humility and negation of ego, my begging bowl. So in a large measure, he is my lifeline.

5. At our age (the autumn of our lives), I like that he and I have also agreed to throw sex out of the relationship when the act of love had become painful and uncomfortable as we moved into our 50s and 60s.

6. I love receiving tight hugs and an absent-minded kiss on my forehead or hair from him, and I love to get up from my single bed early in the chill of a Baguio morning and move to his, slip under the soft but warm flannel blanket, and "spoon" him, two aging persons whose romantic love has gracefully slid to comfort seeking and the occasional dates on a table for two at what we residents up there call The Hill.

7. I am proud of the fact that I married  a man of stamps (a serious philatelist), not a man of letters, many of who he dislikes because he finds them pretentious or members of the singing group The Pretenders. This way, I can encrypt messages and notes without his minding that he is a vital source of material for my younger-than-springtime eyes and writing fingers. He is secure in his person-hood so that when people ask if he minds that I don't use his surname in my profession, he quickly retorts, "May sariling pangalan na siya noon pa man."

8. I intend to have a glass of juice and a piece of banana for breakfast so I can line my tummy tum tum for the brunch friend Chit is laying out for one of my best chummy chum chums Pablo, and possibly his grandson Emman.

9. At exactly 1 p.m., I have to take a leave from our degustation to hitch a ride with a Benedictine monk so I and four other visual artists can make it to the San Beda Museum in  Alabang Hills for a five-person show called "Lima Lima" to mark the museum's fifth year under the able management and curatorship of Joseph Renta who, by the way, is a children's book writer, too. I was just too happy to accept his request to translate his short story, dedicated to his children, from the original Filipino to English.

10. I so love to work before the brightness of another new day when light slowly envelopes the room of my girlhood.

11. I will garb myself in an extra-large size cotton Pinangga blouse and black pants for today's event/s so I can maintain my reputation, such as it has become, as Ms. Cool as a Cucumber.

12. I am comforted by the thought that Marj Evasco once told a group of women writers that in our yoga group, I'm the only one who can touch my toes without bending my knees, apart from our instructor, of course.

13. Anent to that, decades ago, in his tiny office at the top of Solidaridad Bookshop, F. Sionil Jose, already potbellied, also told a tinier group of  writers that he would someday like to touch his toes, too, the way I demonstrated in front of the others when I weighed 80 pounds less. Can still do it, Manong Frankie, can still do. At that time (the 1980s), I was still enrolled at Julie Borromeo's Dance Arts Studio in Mandaluyong when it was still part of Rizal province.

14. I miss my grandchild Butones with a pain so acute, sometimes I feel my heart flutter as though it is about to shatter into a million tinier-than-tiny pieces. I am missing her because of work commitments in the lowlands. I miss witnessing, and actively participating in, her increasing grasp of verbal language. I've told her mom, my dearest Kimi, to please make Filipino the mother tongue of Butones and English a supplemental language later on. Also, I've requested our other family member Mackenzie who cooks like a whiz when not caring for Butones to speak to the little dear in Iluko, Mac's native language.

15. I love my mother more at 85 than when she was younger and busier than busy to help my dad (she was a real helpmeet)  make ends meet as they raised eight children because now that I am an adult, despite my disability of having the emotions of a child, we can talk quietly. I can confide to her how much I had learned from her and Daddy's example to give to the point where it really really hurts already, then quickly forget how much you've given. Mom and Dad believe in what is now a New Age-ish standard belief that one must constantly create a vacuum, a gaping hole in one's life, even if it means loss of expected income or material goods, because the Universe is kind and quickly fills up the gap and patches it up.

16. I love the fact that my seven siblings have come to appreciate me, their ate, because they've seen how all these years I've worked hard and denied myself luxuries, except for books and some art materials. I luv it, luveet that the example shown by our grandest mother, Telesfora C. Lolarga, is ingrained in all of us, in my cousins, too: that the true measure of a person is not his/her material riches but soul riches (the company of friends, application of education where one can be of service to others, finding strength in prayer in whatever manner it is expressed, hooking up to The Source when frustrated because one cannot do anything or everything alone).

17. I am trapped on this swivel chair until I finish this exercise.

18. I consider the role of a teacher an honor and a privilege. I believe that one does not enter a classroom of young minds when one is just fresh out of college. One must be hardened, even nearly broken, betrayed and marginalized in the real world, before stepping into a room. That way, the teaching is enriched with experience. And the young have no illusions; that it is indeed a jungle out there, and they have to steel themselves for it by learning to trust in the power of The Word.

19. I wish for more Mondays like this one when I can look forward to a brunch and an exhibit opening, thus making Monday a fun day in spite of looming deadlines.

20. I've accepted that I cannot work towards perfection (e.g., my drafts, even my published works sometimes, are riddled with typos and missing close quotes). I am happy to admit such mistakes because I am all too human.

21. During the rare parties I co-host with Kuya Fern, I like that I can drink scotch on the rocks as much as I want without my partner objecting because he, too, is inebriated with light beer and/or red wine.

22. I also like that Kuya Fern is not fond of using terms of endearment like "honey," "darling," "babe" or "sweetheart". The still hard-boiled newsman in him makes him say "Hoy, kain na tayo." 

23. I resent that he hasn't addressed me even by my nickname "Babeth" in a loooooooooong time.

24. Letter-writing is on  top of my few favorite things, up there with brown paper packages tied up with strings and the music of the masters.

25. I know that I am loved, and even much better, I know how to love. 

P.S. Good morning, world!

40 @ Forty

This blogger puts on her painter's beret for this occasion to which her friendly readers are invited.

Date/Time:  July10,  Tuesday,  at 10 a.m.

Venue:  San Beda Alabang Museum 

San Beda College Alabang 

8 Don Manolo Avenue

 Alabang Hills Village

Muntinlupa City 

Map to the venue:  http://goo.gl/maps/0xmk

In celebration of San Beda College Alabang's ruby anniversary, the public is invited to the exhibit opening July 10 at San Beda Alabang Museum.

The line-up includes National Artists, masters, contemporary artists and those featured in past museum exhibits.

The exhibit  will be on view until Aug. 10.
 
The 40 artists are:

Aba Lluch Dalena

Alee Garibay

Alynnah Macla

Ambie Abaño

Ang Kiukok

Aris Manero Soriano

Babeth Lolarga

Bayani Ray Acala

Bencab

Ben Dailo

Benjie Cabangis

Bisoy Iglesia

Brendale Tadeo

Chloe Dellosa

Clara Herrera

Claro Ramirez

Dawani de Leon

Don Salubayba

Elmer Borlongan

Federico Alcuaz

Fernando Amorsolo

Fernando Sena

Glenn Cagandahan

Imelda Cajipe Endaya

Jamie Bauza

JB Gamboa

Joe Datuin

Joey Cobcobo

Jomike Tejido

Jose Joya

Julie Lluch

Katti Sta. Ana

Luis Ac-ac

Plet Bolipata

Ramon Orlina

Robert Alejandro

Rolf Campos

Rosa Lodriga

Sinag De Leon, and 

Wed Lodriga

Paper cut and other workshops at San Beda Alabang