Art
2014-2018
Monochrome Period
For as long as I can remember, I have always had a passion for painting things: things that are imaginary and things that are real. But it wasn’t really until junior high school when I began treating art as a serious vocation and not merely as an amusement or pastime.
Throughout junior high, I produced at least twenty (mostly monochromatic) works in pen and ink, though sometimes with a touch of gouache or watercolor. This period of my artistic journey is hence referred to as the Monochrome Period in retrospect. The truth is, however, that I never meant to paint in such a consistent style for that epoch of my life. It simply happened.
At the time, I was an angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenager. My mentors taught me the rules of art and when faced with such gift I’d always, almost instinctively, fall back to smashing them into whatever unfortunate canvas or piece of paper sat in front of me for the time being. I was chaotic, and my art could do nothing but to reflect that.
Eventually, as I matured into an adult, around the time I was in my final year of Senior High, my art shifted. My propensity for fiery, untamable chaos gradually subsided and made way to a period of wanton beauty, remarkable not for the paintings themselves, but for the context outside my work. By the earlier half of 2019, I was painting almost exclusively in gouache and watercolors.
2019-2022
Pandemic Years
From the darkness of the Covid-19 Pandemic came a new epoch in my art. Bold strokes, bright and luminous like the stuff of phantasms, of dreams. This period of my work kicked off from my virtual graduation, blazed through the entirety of my gap year, before my artistic endeavors fell into stagnation and neglect for the sake of my academic career.
2022-Present
Fresco Period
Despite neglecting to even pick up a brush during my freshman year in De La Salle University, I remained fascinated with art and could never bear to part with it for anything else. So for my twenty-second birthday, my parents gifted me a stylus-enabled 2-in-1 tablet and laptop.
This, of course, led to yet another new direction in my painting, as I gave up physical art materials for that of my stylus, tablet, and whatever digital painting software I get my hands dirty with. I fondly refer to it as the “Fresco Period” – after Adobe Fresco, the first digital painting software I truly became immersed in, to the point of it being my second nature.
Portrait of a Liberal Voter
Portrait of Anton Chekhov
Caulfield’s Sickness
Marc Paulinus 