HEYDAYS WITH_

Hey there! It's a Tuesday here in sunny Manila and we are officially in the 7th week of Enhanced Community Quarantine program. I will not lie by saying that it has been an easy seven weeks for me, my family, and the rest of the world. We are all struggling and I acknowledge the reality that it is not for anyone to measure whose struggle weighs out more. Each of us has different capacities of coping, accepting, and growing at this time and that is completely fine. I continue to pray for our leaders, our front liners, and each of us - that we remain in the presence of faith, wisdom, assurance, and security that we are all under the sovereign guidance of our Lord. It is hard, it will be hard, but we are never alone in this battle, and that is the great truth in that!

I wish to end today by sharing with you another special section in the blog called Heydays With_. This section has been in the burrows of my journal since 2018 and I just honestly did not have the energy and will to start it. But with the extra time that I am given now, I thought that it would be great to finally start and use this section as an avenue to connect people together. 

Inspired by the idea of collaboration, friendship, gatherings, and conversations, this section aims to introduce you to different people and their stories of creativity, hope, adventure, and passion. Heydays With_ shall introduce you to different people from different walks of life and industries - whether it be their hobbies, their passions and pursuits, their workspaces, and favorite places.

Allow me to kickstart the series by asking you to spend the Heydays With_Me as I show you a bit about my art, the inspirations I look up, and about my general process. In doing so, I hope to be able to encourage you, yes you, to explore and try your hand at creating something. It does not matter if you have a background in art or if you just purely wish to try and have a creative outlet, the main idea is that you get to express yourself and extend that to a specific medium that you prefer.

 When I finally decided to study again and take my Masters in 2017, I already knew that it was either Furniture and Lighting Design or Fine Arts and Design. I chose the latter because I still had unresolved feelings for not taking Fine Arts in college. I thought the desire would die down but I was still drawn to pursue it, mainly because I wanted to formally understand the principles, processes, and theories of Art and Design.

While in school, we were asked to read a lot of art, design, and education journals. It also got me acquainted with the wide varieties of Art movements, its artists, and their styles. It is in graduate school where I learned how one should look at art; while it mostly involves our senses, it also involves the ability of association, appropriation, and investigation. It's where I learned to put proper definitions on processes and philosophies that I was unconsciously practicing mindlessly while making art. I truly enjoyed my time in Art school, mainly because it gave me a deeper understanding of how artists are theorists in their own right and it made me respect all forms of art as I discovered them one by one.

I would say that I found myself to be a Modernist in both practices of art and design. But this does not mean that I have low regard with Romanticists and Realists. I still believe that one should know the foundation of Classical art in order to understand the process and practice of modernism. I look up to artists Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Calder a lot as they, to me, balance perfectly the interaction of art, space, and being.

Suprematism, Oil on Canvas, 1915 by Kazimir Malevich
(Image Source)

Suprematism was one of the most radical art movements that developed in art history. Its founder, Kazimir Malevich anchored heavily on the influence of literature and criticism. He believes that words and signs were delicate equals and just as literary critiques were driven to investigate the process behind every literature, Malevich searched for the essentials of art.

Abandoning the subject of realism, Suprematists believed that the medium is one with the art, it seemed to emphasize that the surface or the texture of the paint is indeed an equal and essential quality in the meaning and value of the art. Though the movement did not last very long, this type of movement and thinking in art production has inspired a lot of modern artists all over the world. It has also influenced a lot of Designers and Architects from different generations.

A Kinetic Sculpture by Alexander Calder in the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea. Taken during my first solo trip in 2014!

Both Malevich and Calder celebrated the poetics and purity of geometric forms. It is through their art that I was able to appreciate and understand more that all forms are essentially products of variations and extrusions of shapes combined. It is through their art that I was able to also understand how shapes can greatly dictate the weight and eventually affect space. And as I muster in their art, I have also learned to develop a style that I would fondly call my own.

It started as a therapeutic mental and creative exercise for me. In between writing research papers, lectures, and conducting my classes daily, I found rest in art. Following up on my admiration for Malevich and Calder, I have also been studying the principles of Suprematism and Constructivism.

Basically, Constructivism is an influential modernist art movement that started in Russia during the 20th century. It celebrates the idea of careful technical analysis of materials or mediums and how each element can be constructed together in a given space, in art's case the canvass or a site in design language. Constructivists wanted to veer away from the traditional mindset of composition in order to express the beauty of emotion and instead focused on how objects are created to represent a specific mindset, world, or belief. Through this type of process and analysis, the goal of many constructivists was to produce analytic art or design that may lead to designing functional objects in the future. Constructivist Art acknowledges dynamism and the varying qualities of space and time.

Here are a few of my early works while practicing the fundamentals of Constructivism and Suprematism. I wanted to lean on pattern construction and how I could iterate these images into Interior and Object Design. At that time, I wanted to go back to the idea of manual production as I have noticed that the art of collage and sketching was gradually fading among the young generation of design and art students. And so being an educator who wanted to practice what she preached, I went back to creating art - manually.

With the Rectangle, Square, and Triangle as the supreme elements of the space, I was able to create different design studies that showcase dynamic movement, color dominance, and balance as well as texture capacities. It was by practicing constructivism that I re-learned the beauty of space and how the simplicity of a line or volume could greatly impact or influence each element that it surrounds. Collage is actually a great exercise on precision and composition and I highly recommend it to all of you!

The beauty of art, in general, is that it gives its viewer the liberty to denote their own experience and meanings. With the absence of a written brief and the artist, there really is not much there to be left for the viewer but his own voice and reason. And this is the type of art I continuously study and wish to extend to all of you. It could be a crane, it could be a person dancing, it could be just purely pink and purple triangles placed together, the main fact that one is inquiring its meaning and even the process behind it - is pure magic and wonder to me.

These are my latest works produced during the duration of the Enhanced Community Quarantine. It was mainly inspired by the vibrant bougainvilleas and lush greenery surrounding me as well as the idea and longing to see the sea and the sunset. It is summer here in my side of the globe and having this kind of setup is indeed a new normal for all of us, Summer just went by so fast and we were really not able to notice it that much. But still in the midst of what is lacking, what remains are the essential parts of our lives - a shelter to protect us, a family to keep us company, enough food on the table to keep us energized, water to drink, and merely the idea of waking up and moving around. These are the triangles, the squares, and the lines of our lives - and no matter how much they are bent, reproduced, subtracted, they remain to be ever-present in our space and in our lives.

I hope that you are all safe and healthy in this time uncertainty. Let's continue to stay at home, reflect on what is important, acknowledge our sadness, talk to a trusted friend or family member, and find that medium to express your wonder, creativity, or your thoughts.

Join me again next week for another round of Heydays With_ as I will be introducing you to a young educator who takes refuge and delight in fashion, travel, and art!

Happy Heyday!

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LINK LOVE:

What is Constructivism?

The Story of Constructivism

MOMA on Suprematism

The Suprematist Movement

Kazimir Malevich

Alexander Calder

The Works of Calder