Sunday, May 17, 2015

bidibidi's la huerta

bidibidi's la huerta
business mirror, life/lifestyle section
12 may 2015
bidibidi's "fragility has its own intensity"
bidibidi's "leafless, listless"
in photo: bidibidi's fragility has its own intesity and her forests, 
which are arresting in their solace and shadow.

bidibidi has a garden, which she calls La Huerta.  bidibidi has paintings and they are all about the blooms and colors in her garden.

La Huerta, the spanish term for "vegetable garden," is more than that.  it is a pocket forest along the highway going to a place called Baao in Camarines Sur, Bicol.  the place is an artist's haven, a refuge if you want to dramatize how artists - visual artists in particular - in this country do not have a room or a studio of their own.

every now and then, bidibidi would hold intimate parties to welcome guests from nearby cities or towns.  sometimes, i get this sense that the celebration is for no reason at all. the celebration is the reason for the celebration.  in these gatherings, blooms are on the tables.  it is not rare that the lowly quotidian fruit, the macopa, is presented. the sense of color then becomes remarkable as the guests appraise the tenderest of pastel on the skin of the fruit.
bidibidi's "the forest is a woman"
bidibidi's " paths cross"
that tenderness, such fragility, the ephemera of leaves and flowers are in this collection of paintings of bidibidi.

one such work bears the title "fragility has its own intensity."  in her garden, flowers are of consequence; they are not the helpless decor that we think always of them to be. even as the artist shades the lilac and the ochre and the red, the petals are stubborn shapes suffusing the frame.  behind them is a backdrop of faint yellow and light green, but they do not matter for the flowers have conquered the space.

in "dawn awaits." we encounter the profusion of blooms again, but they seem to give way to a brightening of the horizon.  still strong, the flowers stand to the side.
bidibidi's "dawan awaits"
a piece called "too much one, too much each other," bidibidi manipulates the practice of a diptych without resorting to two panels.  a yellow green backdrop on the left, one notices, is slightly narrower than the blue backdrop on the right.  the flowers are separated also with six forming a bouquet on the blue side and two on the left.  the humor is not lost on the tradition of giving flowers, where less is more but where more is really also more given a different occasion.
bidibidi's " too much one, too much each other"
however, i particularly covet the trees of the artist.  where bidibidi's flowers are strong and vitally organic in shapes, her trees are arresting in their solace and shadow. textured and zoetic even without the foliage, the trees of bidibidi are the full narrative of our ecology.

in bidibidi's woodland, the trees form a cluster of a small forest but each trunk stands singular because of their form and their color.  in a grouping of mauve trees surrounded by blue and dark green trunks and twigs, a yellow gnarled trunk twists and rises from the ground that carries the same pale yellow color.  then you realize:  it is the sun filtering and singling out a tree.

in another pairing of trees, six stumps - the middle gloomy red and deep green, the leftmost growth in pallid eggyoke and the rightmost towering in near black shade - are seen amid a cloud of what looks like foliage or a mass of soil.  the impact of the arrangement is one of caution and concern. but the artist is not saying anything;  she is making us feel something in the forest.

in another forest, bidibidi's images for us thin trees.  are they dying or growing?  a blue backdrop is the only heavenly item within this frame where growth and decay seemingly form two sides in the life-coin.
bidibidi's "when the river runs dry"
the works of bidibidi, without diminishing her own authenticity, reminds me of another bicolana artist, the Italy-based Lina Llaguno-Ciani.  where Ciani's works are marked by distinct minimalism (her works have been described as "surrealism without angst"), bidibidi's trees and flowers subjugate a palette of colors.  bidibidi is a neo-Fauvist, in love with all kinds of colors and shades.

i have always wanted to write about this artist mainly because i admire her concern for new artists.  i have seen her La Huerta, the empirical garden in her farm.

her service to art, however, is in her ability to color the growth in forests that are either vanishing or becoming, and to pay tribute to the vain and valiant flora in her mind.













Tuesday, May 5, 2015

the flowers in my forest


i spent the entire month of april in the dirt, when i say that, i do not mean literally.  i mean, i was along the flower beds and the garden in my forest.  i was working on the series i wanted to include in the solo exhibit scheduled to open on my birthday: "living in colour".
every after my dips and splashes with the brush, i doubt i have ever washed my hands more, and the tiny cracks in my fingers seem permanently darkened, or at least for a day or two, until i start with the next canvass and the stain on my skin gets another hue.  i cannot wash it all away, and i do not want to. these stains remind me of who i am.



the gloaming twilight of life
i am a farmer, and an artist.  not necessarily in that order.  i am married to this land. and with vows one take to the altar, too: for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to eternity and beyond. . .ooops! bwahahaha!
and this commitment with the land i am in, every seed or root is in a give-and-take relationship with me. i plant and water and feed good compost, and the plant grows and gives me fruit or something beautiful to lay my eyes on.  
the soft seduction of lost hopes



this kind of life feels like the original intention for my life.  i was made for this! this is part of the poem the force must have written about me, and now it is coming to pass:  i was always to be a flower lady and a woman with dirt in her skin.  literally and figuratively. bwahahaha!
my truth of being in the tropics has nothing to do with what or how i grow my flowers. i bask in the freedom of my imagination!  afterall, there is no way to control one's mind and heart, is there?  bwahahaha!
such valiant wit




so i grow my poppies to take colours that fill my desires.  i can make them blush to the hottest pink or the deepest red when i want to, or bend and sway them to impossibility.  i can grow them with my trees, where there is not a ray of sun among them, or maybe let them climb with vines to heights no one has ever reached!  i can form tight buds waiting in suspense to unveil.  not once did i doubt that they will bloom into myriad of colours, shapes and sizes. they take form in however i want them to be.  what a sight!  the edges of the fiercest yellow widened until fists of petals opened like offerings for the taking.  take me!  i hear myself saying that out loud.
nothing makes my life more beautiful than it already is.  who else can will a room to overflow with blooms? these flowers in my forest, i can smell their mysterious scents when i wake up and they lead me right where they are planted.  from my studio, i can smell their invigorating scents, fresh, welcoming, inviting, tempting. take me!
the heroic jig




looking at them lined up on the walls of my gallery, i find myself thinking:  these flowers, their beauty is beyond what is real. i hold one against the light, i realize defiantly, they will not wilt, never. they look so right with the trees in my forest, oblivious of storms brewing up somewhere.
i walk back through the gaps between my trees, look for my real flowers and the thought takes my breath away: the blooms come from abiding, from letting the root do what it does.
i love this life that gasps at the frangipanis by the paths beside my forest and the marigolds and cosmos popping their heads out of greens of lined herbs and spices.  let it be that i see beauty in my own life like this. it is mine, but it does not belong to me.  the flowers fade, but the blooms in my heart's forest - these are the things that last forever.
the flowers in my forest 4/n
and life is good!