Waling Gorospe’s yarn

Telling a yarn refers to a shorthand way of saying that a story is made believable through an elaborate unraveling of an account. It could also mean embellishing the truth with details, obscuring or making long-winded the eventual outcome of a narrative. A recent exhibit of paintings by Waling Gorospe spun a different yarn, so to speak. She creates a remarkable visual vocabulary with her brush to reveal new facets of painting as an art form. Her overblown images of threads woven as cloth capture the magnificence of a traditional technology made new each time by reenactments of weaving. Gorospe similarly renews the ‘fine art’ practice of painting by returning to textiles as subjects and representing their details on big canvasses. The results are a set of vividly rendered fabrics that came from her recollection of different ceremonial cloth she has seen here and abroad.

The artist chose to represent parts of three types of cloth whose nearly perfect examples may have taken generations to achieve. It is curious that she seems to be acknowledging women, like her, who are storehouses of creativity and oral history. In her main painting, she used the predominantly indigo blue cloth to demonstrate that they have the power to bring together loose strands and bind them into fine cloth. Her meticulous attention to facets of the textile evoked the same interest weavers have in creating textiles. Gorospe did this by revealing its details thread-by-thread, extensive in its disclosure of stitches used to adorn the hand-woven fabric. She believes that by attracting us to its peculiar aspects, draws us to how cloth can also chronicle the lives of their makers.

Her homage to the producers of the textiles she found attractive is instinctive, particularly in her intricate translation of three of them on to canvasses. She was so rapt with them that Gorospe has turned the ceremonial textiles into paintings. In her many travels abroad as a flight attendant of a major airline, she developed a fondness for the fabrics she saw at bazaars. Her frustration at being unable to afford the expensive textiles turned into a passion for painting them as realistically as possible. Sometimes the effect is so stunning that her paintings looked like the real thing, just stretched on to frames.

By painting their details, Gorospe is trying to convince us of the textile’s useful beauty from the weavers’ hands until it reached hers. The artist demonstrated this to us by painting a part of it on a canvas stretched to an 6 x 4 feet board, magnifying it several times to make us see features she finds interesting. She composes them asymmetrically to remind us that it is an incomplete fabric. For instance, a diamond-shaped appliqué at the top of the canvas has its top cut off, spilling out beyond what we can see. It is interesting that her depiction of the cloth is still done on cloth, even if her canvas started as a plain and machine-produced fabric.

Accompanying this large-scale painting were six 24-by-24-inch pieces, representing details from it. These were mainly the stone ornaments, cross-stitched by thick red thread. In the big canvas, they look like they form squares around the diamond appliqué. But the compositions of these stone ornaments conveyed a different visual language when some of them were painted individually on smaller canvasses. The imperfectly shaped stones against the vibrant indigo blue cloth, as well as the red thread that secures them makes us notice. I was tempted to find the representation of the stone in the large painting that would match those in the smaller ones. Her two other large-scale paintings were just as lavish in her hands. In one, she revealed the supplementary warp weave that Kalinga women create for a brocade effect. Gorospe also included parts where shaped mother of pearl shells are attached to decorate the typical wrap skirt used by some groups of Kalinga women. She challenged herself further in another painting where she showed tiny cracked mirrors on an Indian fabric, resplendent in its rich textures and dark colors. Through her peculiar devices in encapsulating a moment or detail, Gorospe succeeded in making viewers look closely at her paintings.

Focusing my gaze, I realized Gorospe also shared attributes with the weaver of the cloth beyond their gender. The same abstract thinking that goes into weaving may also found in painting. Painters like Gorospe think of unusual images that may be depicted on canvasses, such as still life or landscape subjects. But they only find out if it is possible to successfully translate those ideas into art until they actually paint them. This is a crucial instant when artists may succeed or fail in representing their ideas. In a way, Gorospe celebrates this moment of her personal triumph. We endorse this by looking closely at what is shown to us. It resembles the way in which we admire and find attractive women who wear particular textiles that suit them and the context within which they were worn. In this case, it was probably the blue ground of Gorospe’s paintings, complimented by the red thread of her subject, which easily drew viewers’ attention.

Continuing from other fabrics she has painted in the past, Gorospe now seems to want to unfold them as though she is about to tell another tale. She has dubbed this her "Mica" series that reflect her desire to increase the three-dimensional look of her paintings. In this sense, her being able to create a tromp l’oeil – or three-dimensional effect on two-dimensional surface – is a way of telling a yarn.

But the textile, as depicted by Gorospe in her paintings is far from perfect. It may seem like it because the vividness of the cloth’s design and color in her main painting may obscure it but the more glaring flaw is the missing stone embellishments. This has contributed to the rich textures of Gorospe’s work. It may also suggest the age of the cloth but what seems to be more important to her is to stir in us an enchantment of art, particularly to paintings. The imperfections are her way of demonstrating how artists can intervene in their representation to get our attention. From that, we can gather that she is telling us a tale through her art. Although her visual language is unusual, the artist makes us see and listen to the point she is trying to make. Gorospe gave us a glimpse of the sum of human knowledge that went into her special cloth. Her tall tales are only as high as how we want to perceive the length of her unraveling fabrics, which she reveals in her paintings.

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