The exhibition serves as an auspicious re-launching of the Corredor which aims to establish it as a repository of art in the University and forge dynamic linkages with artists and institutions, here and abroad, all to enhance UPCFA’s academic operations.
UPCFA hopes to achieve this vision through active partnership with art patrons in the private sector. For this initial venture, several corporate friends lent their support to the undertaking: the Makati Skyline, Inc., Tri-Scope Media Marketing, Inc., Horizon Edsa Hotel, Delpa Specialties, Inc., LeFranc & Bourgeois, Boysen Paints, Ralph’s Liquor Store, and Mr. Sun.
With the anticipated support of business and industry, the College hopes to break untraversed realms of artistic explorations to correspondingly sustain excellence and leadership in the education of the career artist.
The art of printmaking takes centerstage in this exhibition.
Lim’s works, once described by Agnes Gund, president of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, as "delicately beautiful," are culled from childhood memories spent in the country. The detailed beauty of the nostalgic past is captured through a subtle style that has since become her métier.
Lim’s prints emerge from a dynamic overlapping of artistic concerns, blending the old with the new, and building on color upon color, technique upon technique. The convergence of multiple ideas informs the artist’s work with a new level of artistic maturity. Thus, the title of the show: Layer upon Layer.
Lim presents a cache of works done from 1997 to the present employing a variety of techniques from etching and chine collé to solar plate and carborundum printing processes.
Her artistic technique is a vibrant mixture of printmaking and high technology. While her inspirations are often from the past, her methods are distinctly cutting edge. By doing so, she has found a way to meld her traditional inclinations with high technology and the standard printing press.
One of her highly evolved artistic concerns starts with photocopying or flatbed scanning the raw materials for her art. Focusing on a particularly evocative portion of the resulting printout, she then alters the contrast, form, texture, and other aspects of the image on the photocopier or with computer design software.
In other pieces, Lim uses a soft ground technique to create a plate, etching a combination of textures into it to perfect a composition. The plate is then inked, sometimes using stencils to create a flow of overlapping colors and forms. With these two bases for the print, she freely experiments with the interaction of the pigments with the plate, and the pressure of the printmaking press.
She is now in the stage of her artistic career where she favors non-toxic techniques in printmaking.
"Working with non-toxic materials was especially interesting for me as a printmaker. I was accustomed to using a variety of toxic chemicals in the process. It is refreshing to make a work that is organic in nature," she reveals.
The artist’s palette now bursts with natural colors: balmy green, majestic indigo, sparkling orange, and red that is only seen when fruits are ripe and ready for the picking, all exemplifying an art that has gone deeply personal and consummate.
Lim exemplifies the career artist par excellence. Nurtured by the UPCFA where she finished her bachelor of fine arts in 1967, she has smoothened the rough edges of her art through years and years of artistic pursuit tempered by an enviable discipline that is handsomely reflected in her fine works of print. She also attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, taking courses in printmaking and computer art from 1990 to 1995.
An accomplished and forward thinking printmaker, she has focused on printmaking since 1990, each year making great strides and exploring new techniques. In 1998, Lenore was honored as one of the 12 outstanding Filipino artists overseas by the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. The following year, she was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Lim was one of the 50 artists chosen to participate in a mammoth art exhibit at the United Nations from June 5 to 25, 2000. She was the only Filipino artist to be included in the international exhibit held simultaneously with the World Women Conference 2000 in New York, which gathered some 2,000 women from government and non-government organizations all over the world as a follow-up to a similar conference held in Beijing, China five years ago.
In April 2001, she was feted with an Outstanding Art Award by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, the only Filipino American theater company in the Northeast in the US, which has been around for 13 years.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Lim came to the United States in 1975 and then moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. She and her family have been in New York City since 1988.
To further her art as a professional printmaker, she works at The Printmaking Workshop known as Blackburn Studio where most artists from around the world go to enhance their prints when they are in New York. The workshop was founded 50 years ago by master printmaker Bob Blackburn, now in his 80s, and who was recently honored with an honorary doctorate by Pratt Institutes in Brooklyn, New York.
She has exhibited her work extensively in Austria, Canada, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, the Philippines, and all over the United States.
When not doing art, Lim teaches at the United Nations International School in New York City, a position she has held since 1988. Teaching art is not new to her as she also engaged in art education when she was stationed in Canada, and even before she left the Philippines, when she taught art at the International School and the Assumption Convent.
The exhibition, a joint undertaking of the UPCFA and the UP Diliman Information Office, runs until July 31.