The Many Colors of Blue

Every encounter with artist Pacita Abad can best be described as a burst of color and energy. Hmm, make that a riot of color and energy. Exuberant ends up being too mild a term for Pacita.

Even when the encounter is not an actual, physical face-to-face meeting, her energy is unmistakable. Coming in to work fresh from the holidays I found a package, rather thick and hefty, waiting for me. It was from Pacita (with a return address that was her brother Jorge’s apartment in Ermita; had I missed her again?), and inside was a 2003 Pacita Abad desk calendar and a book whose cover was unmistakably Pacita–splashes of "rich blues, bold reds, vibrant yellows and sensual combinations of black, grey and brown" (Pacita’s own description, which works perfectly) in a cacophony of shapes and forms that is pure energy.

The book chronicles her latest tri-city exhibit, entitled "Endless Blues", which showed at the Artfolio Space in Singapore (where she now lives with husband Jack Garrity) last month and will show at the Hadelund Art Museum in Norway from May to August this year and at the Gibby Waitzkin Fine Art in Washington DC in November.

Pacita paints to blues music, which she has long loved and which is part of the reason for the exhibit and book title. She adds, "Endless Blues is also an apt description of how I, and most of the world, felt after September 11 and the ensuing battle in Afghanistan. New York and Afghanistan are two of the places that I have always loved, having lived in lower Manhattan and hitchhiked around Afghanistan, before the incessant fighting and bombing consumed the country for almost 20 years. Seeing disaster, tragedy and suffering hit people in both of those places brought me down." In addition, there was a personal battle with lung cancer–"chop, burn and poison" is how she describes the ordeal of her medical treatment–which, happily, she has won. She put the eight-month hibernation–the doctors had imposed a travel ban–to good use: she painted, as she always does, accompanied by the blues, the mood and the music pushing brush across canvas.

As indomitable as her spirit is the vibrancy of her paintings. As large as her canvases–she usually uses a ladder to work on them–is her largeness of vision. And as crowded with energy and excitement as her paintings is her eagerness to embrace life and all it has to offer.