A passion for painting

In these difficult times, it doesn’t hurt for anyone to have a second career, especially if you are in this very unstable profession called show business.

Just look at Judy Ann Santos, who is still at her peak, but never runs out of profitable things to do outside of movies and TV.

In the case of Raven Villanueva, the former TGIS star, though not closing her doors to showbiz, has already opted to embrace another profession: Painting and helping run the family gallery.

Practically the entire afternoon, you can find Raven these days at Enzo V Gallery at 3 Abad Santos St., in San Juan. The gallery carries the name of her father, award-winning artist, Enzo Villanueva, who does wood-carved oil paintings (the process is tedious: The wood canvass is carved out first before oil paint is applied). It is not surprising therefore that Raven also paints — with acrylic mainly as her medium.

Way back in New Jersey, where she was born, Raven already knew that she wanted to draw. She remembers getting scolded all the time by her grandmother because the back of her notebooks always had drawings.

Apparently, she drew well because she even won in a drawing contest in school in the grades. (Recently, her nine-year-old daughter Angelica also won in a drawing contest sponsored by Chili’s Restaurant.)

When her family settled in Manila when she was in sixth grade, Raven never really did much to cultivate her talent because she focused on show business when she was in high school (at Immaculate Heart of Mary in Better Living in Parañaque) — starting in That’s Entertainment of German Moreno.

In 2000, while living in Guam, she went to Guam University and enrolled in Fine Arts for two semesters. This was where she learned how to do still life, landscape and basic mixing of colors. She actually wanted to continue with her art studies, except that she had to return to Manila a year later. In lieu of formal art studies, she gets pointers from her artist father, who continues to teach and correct Raven, especially when it comes to blending of colors.

Raven obviously is doing well because she already had her one-woman exhibit last month and got some of her works sold. She describes her figures to be, well, “a bit out of this world.” She paints trees that are shaped like lollipops and her people figures are mostly in flight.

One of her works was even featured in Showbiz Central — in a segment that deals with ghosts and the occult. The mysterious painting — called Night Flight — shows a cemetery and a figure of a girl flying. According to one of her friends who saw it, the painting “had something in it.” A psychic who was called in by Showbiz Central claims that the ghost of a child actually guided Raven while she was working on the painting. “No, I didn’t feel anything scary or anything different while I was painting it — maybe because I’m basically sensitive to those things. I’d just be praying, for instance and I’d already be feeling a presence nearby. I’m like that,” she claims.

But other than that work, Raven insists, that there’s nothing strange about her other paintings and sketches (in colored pencils) and is bent to do more — without guidance from some spirit.

Oddly enough (it was never intentional), the next exhibit at their gallery will feature the works of playwright Tony Perez, who — as we all know — is the moving force behind the Spirit Questors.

The family gallery, however, is basically to showcase the works of Enzo Villanueva, but Raven is just as pleased now that she has an outlet for her artistic bent. “Painting is very relaxing,” she says. Helping run a gallery, on the other hand, isn’t really all that difficult and she is, in fact, looking forward to opening another gallery, preferably in the White Plains area.

But no, she’s not turning her back on show business yet and says that she can attend to both fields at the same time. However, it’s really best that she has a fallback especially in these hard times. In these very hard times.