Lady paints the blues

After all the dismal and saddening news that hit Philippine art the past few months – from the outrageous auction sale of Juan Luna’s "Parisian Life" to the passing of Nonoy Marcelo and more recently, Santi Bose, to the eventual closing of the Luz Gallery in 2003 – here is one bit of news that will surely warm many hearts in the scene.

From a self-imposed furlough for almost a year now because of her bout with lung cancer, Pacita Abad is back in harness. Pacita is so relieved and happy she is out of it, overcoming the "chop, burn and poison,’’ which she squarely dealt with the last nine months. She is also grateful to the great medical attention made available to her in Washington, D.C. and Singapore which has helped her leap back to her healthy condition now.

Needless to say, the greatest therapy, she admits, was being confined in her studio during the period. She was on a travel ban because of the medication given to her. But it turned out to be for the best as she was able to exorcise all the demons out of her system, only to recover from the stupor that she has in her hand a cache of phenomenal paintings she was able to accomplish, a feat which would have been quite impossible to do if she were on the road.

Her "soul" companion during those times was the Blues. Inspired by the nostalgic music of the blues, the paintings constitute a testament to Pacita’s fondness for the music and its many moods. She is a long-time blues fan, starting from when she was studying for her graduate degree and hanging out with blues musicians in San Francisco, to the time she settled down in Washington, D.C., prior to her living in Indonesia, and now in Singapore.

And to underscore the close affinity between Pacita’s art and music, the Universal Blues Band played during the artist’s opening cocktail reception in late November at Artfolio Space located at the Raffles Hotel Arcade along Northbridge Rd. in Singapore. The opening set the tone, as it fleshed out the aural influences that propelled Pacita in completing these 100 paintings in series she aptly called Endless Blues.

Pacita’s latest series is a rich collection of large- and medium-sized abstract oil paintings collaged with batik and hand-woven cloth to create vibrant, colorful works.

Although this series is about the blues, most of the paintings are bursting with bright colors, reflecting a total freedom of expression. For the large artworks, a mixture of different oils of rich blues, vibrant yellows, and sensual combinations of black, gray and brown are accentuated with subdued Indonesian batiks, meticulously sewn on by the artist. The smaller paintings highlight materials like tin, copper, glass, buttons or handmade paper giving the canvases a three dimensional effect. The overall impact of Pacita’s paintings is one of originality, spontaneity and vitality that combine to express the artist’s moods and feelings over the past 18 months.

"Endless Blues," says Pacita, "has nothing to do with being sad…. It is all about the music, which I have been listening to, in the last three decades of my life. It was accentuated this time with the conditions happening around the world and my own personal struggle with lung cancer."

Aside from paying tribute to the blues, which emerged as one of the most important musical forms in the 20th century, the collection can be viewed in several levels.

On a more personal level, the paintings reflect Pacita’s emotional turmoil, as she struggled over the past year with lung cancer and its associated surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The emotional and physical sense of uncertainty literally confined her to her studio to work on this series, and she realized that the best therapy for her, of course, was to paint. Given all these, Pacita’s paintings show a full range of emotions, often happy, sometimes nostalgic, and once in a while melancholy, but always positive and very colorful.

The series also expresses the unsettled mood that has engulfed both the artist and the world after Sept. 11. It is an apt description of how Pacita, along with millions of people across the globe felt after September 11 and the ensuing battle in Afghanistan. New York and Afghanistan are two of the places the artist has always loved, having lived in lower Manhattan and hitchhiked in Afghanistan before the fighting and bombing of almost 20 years.

As with her trapunto work, Pacita’s painting continue to underscore her perceptions of landscape and people, of tradition and culture, of success and failure, of her choice of colors and her basis of inspiration.

Her works are full of earthiness graced with humor, and these reside in the mind’s eye long after one has left the scene of the work. Her art is about a fundamental emotional need to turn the ordinary of the universal voice into the extraordinary.

Ian Findlay describes Pacita’s works as complex – her strong line, her attention to color, her willingness to stitch and sew and to use collage and to employ an uncommon variety of materials to obtain her desired end – these are elements or her work that reflect very different parts of her life and her personality.

The complexity of her art as seen in Endless Blues is an extension of her interaction with the real world and real cultures. There is nothing false in the expression of her sentiments which is why the viewer is willing to confront it and to embrace it, even though they may not like it initially or intuitively.

Pacita, who is a constant traveler, incorporates in her body of work the emotions, color and character she discovered during her journeys. Her work is a progression of ideas and accomplishments rather than a definitive statement. The artist’s images have come to form a complex narrative that has embraced everything from the figurative to the abstract utilizing a wide variety of materials. The wealth and dynamic of her art speaks directly to the viewer and the experience is augmented by the viewer’s awareness of her processes, her art making, her construction.

The strength of Pacita’s most recent work reflects her coming to terms with changes in her life, with adjustments to awareness of mortality, the desire to seek out fresh avenues of visual exploration.

Endless Blues, unlike the artist’s previous passion for trapunto painting, represents work that is less busy with construction. The imagery here is looser and more confident in a painterly sense. In essence, it is a return to painting, although many works retain the spirit and some activity of the trapunto. Using rich oils more than acrylics also added to the difference in surface textures. The surfaces are further enhanced by her clever use of cloth strips.

Her paintings are more willing to express a particular view rather than a general view of a culture, to reveal the personal rather than obscure it. She achieves a sense of poetry that is striking both in large-scale and small-scale pieces.

In sum, Endless Blues represents a move that is away from earlier dominant styles into areas that reveal new depths, emotional and psychological. It also points to the beginnings of new voyages of exploration and discovery.

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For comments, send e-mail to ruben_david.defeo@up.edu.ph.