Future perfect: Public’s eye

MANILA, Philippines - Once, street artist BLIC did a tribute project to the miraculous Reina de Cavite, Patroness of the Galleons. It took him two days to finish the giant wall painting — a Marian image standing on a boat, its paint dripping into paper boats then into coins, but with its head under the veil replaced by his signature hand image. A week later, they were asked to take it down. “We were afraid that the church would get pissed at us, but it was the local government,” the 27-year-old artist recounts. His signature textured hand, he was told, reminded the authorities of an alligator. The wall used to have a politician’s ad.

Today, BLIC is the co-founder of an 80-member strong street art collective called CVTY, a contraction of “cavity,” as in, a rotten and painful damage but a necessary nudge to their home province and the rest of Philippine streets. Before this, he took Computer Science at Adamson University. “I didn’t even know there was a Fine Arts program with a major in Advertising,” he says. “I thought it’s just painting, so I didn’t take it.” It is a bit late to find out but also fortuitously timely. By the time he held a brush, he already had the maturity to deal with what he wanted to say.

BLIC, before it became shorthand for “public,” was “BLINK LOVES ICE CREAM,” born out of live doodling sessions. He was a graffiti fan, who tried wheat-pasting, got invited into the premiere graffiti crew Pilipinas Street Plan (PSP), and before he knew it, started collaborating with the best of them. He didn’t know any better, but he remembers PSP’s Deform Industry telling him: just make “honest art.” BLIC says, “Whatever stroke is pleasurable, that’s the right thing, not to take it slow only to please others. If you want to express something, you have to express it honestly, naively.”

From spray-painting to brush-painting and hand-drawing, BLIC evolved into a compelling street imagist. “Now,” he says, after his stages dwelling on images of hoodies and crows, “I’m focusing on the image of the hand. It’s an alternative way to communicate. If you just look at a hand, you can already read something from it. It’s a tool to manipulate your environment.” From someone who started bombing street signs with free freight service stickers, he’s now a veritable street figure freely moving from the streets to the galleries. “I still feel like a beginner,” he says, but with a two-man show coming up this July in SaGuijo and countless more walls in mind, BLIC concludes, “I’ve fully embraced art now. I want to bloom and grow old doing it.”