Future perfect: Midsummer daydream
MANILA, Philippines -If you can’t have it, make it. The kids of Cubao X live this mantra all too well. So because not everyone could be at the beach last Saturday, they moved the nautical art party in the city and called it “Hello Sailor.” The night’s featured artists, Soleil Ignacio and Tokwa Peñaflorida, haven’t had major gallery shows despite their work, so they made one. “I guess artists just want to show their works to the public without all the complications,” Ignacio tells me.
The works watercolor portraits of wavy-haired girls they both love to draw; the show title imagined calls from these seemingly innocent women subjects of corals and seaweed that are indistinguishable from ornaments and bodily growths. They are beautifully sensual but also, Ignacio hints, “They’re the darker version of the mermaid who didn’t dissolve into sea foam.” She winks, “They killed the prince.” Peñaflorida adds, “I’ve always been interested in using wet media. I always try to capture movement in my work.” His goldfish drawings swish their elaborate tails as if swimming through the hair of one of his often drugged-looking girls. Octopus legs surround one in an ambiguous entanglement a strangling or an embrace?
If you observe, you’ll see that the artists have their subjects’ hair, and you’ll see their tattoos a cat on her right forearm, “every day of my life” written on the left one, and a sun on her back, a baroque frame on his right forearm, geometric pattern on his left bicep, “LOREM” and “IPSUM” over his knees, an art nouveau lady on his chest revealing an eclectic aesthetic as aged as the sailor tattoos that have been adopted by the punk movement.
Ignacio’s exposure can be traced to the summer of 2011. Yoko Ono intently gazed back, her lips steady in a “Mona Lisa” smile and her hair flowing forever, from the cover of the youth culture mag Status. It was the month for her, Soleil her name French for “sun” as the title’s first Filipino cover artist, a job previously done only by graffiti artist Fafi and Ed Banger Records Art Director So Me. “It did get the ball rolling for me,” Ignacio says. The next month, she was named the magazine’s new Art Director.
Peñaflorida, on the other hand, despite being diagnosed of having mild autism and ADHD as a child, used to work the hell hours of the advertising agency world. Hence, his sources are very current. Work starts with music (like Angus & Julia Stone, James Blake and Joanna Newsom) and literature (like Haruki Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk). “When there’s a line that I like,” he says, “I try to illustrate it in my mind.” His “The Story of Ophelia,” for example, is classic Shakespeare. But while working as an art director, he was also drawing children’s books. Last year, he published Salamat Po, a values-based book published by Vibal Foundation. This year, a title about environmental awareness as inspired by the experience of Cagayan de Oro during the typhoon Sendong is set to come out. So is “Ang Bonggang-Bonggang Batang Beki (The Fierce and Fabulous Boy in Pink),” his work on possibly Southeast Asia’s first children’s book tackling homosexuality in children.
Both graduates of fine arts at University of the Philippines, Ignacio and Peñaflorida belong to a new creative bunch that does a lot of commercial work. They are in thrall of Art Nouveau god Alphonse Mucha, master of decorative flourishes not only in paintings but also in ads, postcards, and theatrical sceneries. Manga and Marvel bow to him, and so do Ignacio and Peñaflorida with their natural forms, especially flora. Ignacio has illustrated for fashion magazines Mega and Garage. She has made paper dolls for Oxygen, drawn on shoes for Keds, made a poster for the film Suntok sa Buwan, and illustrated Jenni Epperson’s book, Fashion + Food. Her backdrop work for “Wonderland,” which came out in Mega, made it on the website of the Holy Grail for artist press, Juxtapoz.
Their works are influenced by varied sources from traditional art in books to cyber-circulated media. Ignacio’s drawings are evocative of the fashion illustrations of Igor + Andre, the magazine cover sketches by John Paul Thurlow, and the Japanese woodblock girls of Audrey Kawasaki. Peñaflorida work is often compared to the dazed girls of Stella Im Hultberg, incidentally friends with Kawasaki.
Currently, the two artists have bravely embraced the freelance life and have heaps of jobs coming up. Ignacio is working on 16 vintage flora watercolor paintings (with artist boyfriend Kris Abrigo) for a restaurant and on fashion illustrations for a local shoe brand. Meanwhile, she says, “I still have time to do more personal work and to play with my cat.” Soon will be the official launch of Thursday Room, a design collective they founded with other artist friends. Peñaflorida is in the middle of a proposal for a one-man show of non-watercolor paintings. “Doing stuff that you’re not comfortable with helps a lot,” he says, “to grow as an artist and, generally, as a person.”
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Soleil Ignacio and Tokwa Peñaflorida’s “Hello Sailor” exhibit in Heima, Cubao X is running until May 12 2012. Follow their work at blog.choleil.com and tokwap.tumblr.com.
