Marga!R

pigs of wahsuh

2009-04-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, went to Quiapo with my dad (near echague and globo de oro) as well as odeon to stash up on movies for the long weekend. Mainit, matao, maputik since barado ang mga sewers... pero exciting! hahahaha.

I was quietly peering out of the dvd stands and watched my father haggle for the dvd's. Well, i thought that the items were cheap already. But there was valuable insights. He haggles like a chinese kahit mura na, hihinga pa ng extra. hahahaha.... Kahit pa-limalimang piso, papatusin pa rin.

a little about the elusive thing called "genius"

2009-02-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

..daniel tayona first posted this, I think it talked a lot about how creativity comes. ang galing. She talks about the heaviness of sucess, and the pressures and fears of artists. How creativity comes and goes... And how to handle that fleeting thing or vision or poem and capturing it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/453

Wish I had somebody to talk to about this before when i was growing up. I'm just a person who just shows up to do my work. I could only hopethat the divine genius visits me....

Obama's books

2009-01-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

From Books, New President Found Voice

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

WASHINGTON — In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

As Baldwin once observed, language is both “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and “the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Like “Dreams From My Father,” many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child,” caught on the margins of different cultures, dislocated and rootless perhaps, but free to invent a new self.

This notion of self-creation is a deeply American one — a founding principle of this country, and a trope addressed by such classic works as “The Great Gatsby” — and it seems to exert a strong hold on Mr. Obama’s imagination.

In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”

As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”

The incandescent power of Lincoln’s language, its resonance and rhythmic cadences, as well as his ability to shift gears between the magisterial and the down-to-earth, has been a model for Mr. Obama — who has said he frequently rereads Lincoln for inspiration — and so, too, have been the uses to which Lincoln put his superior language skills: to goad Americans to complete the unfinished work of the founders, and to galvanize a nation reeling from hard times with a new vision of reconciliation and hope.

Affairs of the heart exhibit

2009-01-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

am excited to go to bacolod and mount our exhibit in moravia bar c/o pintor kulapol... kitakits!

Slumdog millionaire

2009-01-23T06:11:00.000-08:00

Couldn't help it, I had to write about this. Daniel tayona shared me this movie via usb since he knew i was into bollywood movies. This is the 2nd time I've watched this movie. It still hasn't lost it's charm. I haven't had this much fun watching a film since lagaan. There's sibling rivalry, many parallelisms to Philippine society, slums that don't ask to be pitied, underdogs winning, and that all consuming faith in "destiny". I was still laughing, still crying even the 2nd time around. This is just a really well made film. I hope danny boyle sweeps the oscars. I will watch it again for the 3rd time... But this time, I will make sure i get converts :)

Got featured! The Oneironaut Exhibit

2009-01-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

... Di ko na natext ang lahat ng pumunta, pero thank you so much, i didn't expect a good turn out of people kahit di na ako personally nakapag text ng invites.

Just saw this pr this morning, in the manila bulletin page f2 in the art and travel section... Thank you ms. isabel!!! And thanks dave, for a really nice write up :)

Tribute to the lowly squidballs

2009-01-09T21:32:00.000-08:00

It was around late afternoon when I came out of Atlanta center in Annapolis St. Galing lang ako sa printer called “fans”, disappointed over their conked out digital printer, and mad over the squandered pamasahe and wasted time.

I guess it’s the optimanian in me, pero whenever I get stressed or get dissappointed, I turn to good food. There was a dell catering service sa tabi ng printer, pumasok ako pero parang walang interesting kainin. Pag labas ko ng Atlanta, napansin ko that there were people with bananacue and squidballs. Biglang natakam ako. Oh gosh. I miss squidballs na. The real honest to goodness ones, soft, round, creamy at squid na squid (kahit alam kong puros hangin, msg at arina lang yun).

Si mamang squidballs was around 3 buildings away from atlansta center, pero you know the way people gravitate like flies to the wastebasket? Parang hub yung squidball stand. People were coming and going. May messenger, si haughty secretary na naka heels, si mamang sekyu, your pa-sosy OB Montessori student, at ako, starving artist.

“manong, magkano ba yung squidballs?”

“dalawang piso isa”

“sige, sampung piso nga”

I went ahead and fished out 5 balls, both squid and chicken. You can differentiate the squid ones were pure white, the chicken balls were freckled. (cute no?). I slathered it with sweet and spicy sauce (you never ask what it is, the less you know, the better). Mapaso-paso pa ako in my first bite, pero pucha, PASOK! Parang alam mo yun? Nag crave ka ng masarap ng squidballs, at napagbigyan ka ng diyos at nakahanap ka nga ng perfect stall in the most unlikely of spaces?

Bawat kagat, I forgot about my pending problems, yung mga sama ng loob over the things na di ko nakuha, people reminding me to start eating less, stress over the preparations ng exhibit ko, and impending arguments of my parents pagbalik ng bahay…. before I knew it ubos na yung 5 squidballs ko.

Pucha, bitin.

Nagbilang ako ng barya. May isa pang sampu, pero dapat may panulak. Nakita ko may styro cooler si manong.

“boss may sprite po kayo?” manong, the entrepreneur that he was, opened up the mahiwagang cooler, at naghukay ng sprite when I saw a royal on top.

“kuya, kahit royal nalang, para din a kayo mahirapan maghanap”

He handed me over the royal and I fished another batch of squidballs.

Tuloy ang ligaya! As the flavors whirled around my palate, yung marriage ng sweet, spicy, seafood and msg… I contemplated on my strategies kung paano ako yayaman, paluluhurin yung mga naksakit sa akin, and my eventual, domination of the world. Nandun pa lang ako sa pagpapayaman part, when I’ve reaized with disgust, ubos na squidballs ulit.

And then, I looked at the other people lining up kay mamang squidballs. I hesistated, then contemplated. In the end, I went back.

“ma, huling tawad, pa dalawang kikiam nalang.”, si mamang squidballs smiled. Sanay na siguro ‘to.

Pucha, hirap mag diet

Manor Farm

2008-08-17T03:06:00.001-07:00

this is supposed to be the heavy burden of the yoke of capitalism. The animals of animal farm are again disillussioned by the change of leadership as they find out that the pigs of animal farm resemble their former human master. It meant death for boxer, the horse, and oppression for the rest.

new graphics done...

2008-08-16T05:45:00.000-07:00

... new layouts i did for friends...
http://tinaslittlecorner.multiply.com
http://manjugagoomal.multiply.com
and for lovina.....

static and silence

2008-08-07T19:07:00.001-07:00

here's a little digital artwork i did for the sunday's monochrome song... It's so wonderful!

ts 4 in the morning july in 69
Me and my sister
We crept down like shadows
Theyre bringing the moon right down to our sitting room
Static and silence and a monochrome vision

Theyre dancing around
Slow puppets silver ground
And the world is watching with joy
We hear a voice from above and its history
And we stayed awake all night

And something is said and the whole room laughs aloud
Me and my sister
Looking on like shadows
The end of an age as we watched them walk in a glow
Lost in space, but I dont know where it is

Theyre dancing around
Slow puppets silver ground
And the stars and stripes in the sand
We hear a voice from above and its history
And we stayed awake all night

Theyre dancing around
It sends a shiver down my spine
And I run to look in the sky and
I half expect to hear them asking to come down
(oh) will they fly or will they fall?
To be excited by a long late night

popsicle toes in css

2008-08-07T19:03:00.001-07:00

I was very happy with the out come of the css project i had for a friend, I found it really cute, and i'm glad she liked it a lot too... I hope her husband approves... He's a tough one to please! hahahaah.

here's my temp layout site for her...

http://poptoestry.multiply.com/css-on

Animal Farm

2008-08-02T05:05:00.001-07:00

I was inspired by George Orwell's classic tale of greed and corruption. This is my rendition of "animalism" . It is a collage of the promises of animal farm's utopia. A life of plenty and warmth for animals of manor farm.

I colored the collage using the philippine flag's colors to incorporate it in the philippine setting.This for me is reminiscent of the utopia most politicians promise before elections to the masses. The masses still hope for the future, even if sometimes, as the book reveals, people topple down tyrants and replace governments, leaders are corrupted by absolute power just the same and we are doomed to live the same system, even if we get different leaders. It is a sad reminder that we forget our history and we are always doomed to repeat it.

new website!

2008-07-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

...i'm blushing with pride. this is my new site after a loooooooooooooooong time. I feel like this is my first one true website evah.

http://www.farmandkitchen.com

hope we make it big!

Our asia : Have we met exhibit

2008-07-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

...Hi guys, wanted to share you a link:

http://www.ourasia.tv/index.php/philippines/
art_travel/have_we_met/

just got featured!

single serve friends favorites

2008-06-29T00:29:00.001-07:00

My single serve friends series (my favorites)....

Reena

2008-06-13T01:49:00.000-07:00

I've always known reena in between marriages. The first time i met her at chat, she was using samar's account. And we hit it off suddenly. She's like a sister that i never knew. One thing i did love about her is that she's still open to get married again even if hers ended in a sour note. A few years ago, i heard she was again engaged.... but it didn't last either. She must have been devastated to be be disappointed the second time around.

I made the painting sad. I guess, i see myself in it too, with all my disappointments and apprehensions about relationships.... Always contemplating, trying to make sense out of things, where i went wrong among others....

There is a thousand more words to describe the feelings i have for reena, But for me, at this time, I feel words are inadequate and have a tendency to make it more shallow and cheesy so i have decided to deliver them in her picture.

I hope you like it as much as I loved doing it.

I hope reena be granted the love she deserves, wherever she maybe.

single serving friends

2008-06-11T18:27:00.000-07:00

Single serve friends

.. I’ve been a chatter since 2001. I got inspired by the thought of the idea of people that you meet for a certain time online, then, not being able to keep intouch with them again (hence the term, single serve). Although they send you pics, sex, location, age, and other snippets of information, they remain your friends only for that period you came online. Maybe it’s the culture of single servings that we’ve got accustomed to , like shampoo sachets, single serve milk, and other disposables. We’ve also kept it with the way we meet people nowadays…. So for the thousands I’ve talked to online, here’s something for all of you…

Tonite

2008-06-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

12:10 midnite. Can’t sleep. Drank too much coffee in the afternoon. I feel like I want to split my body into three parts… one to type this blog, one to run my other errands and another to paint on my handmade quilts. I am surprised that I’m still stressed even after leaving the corporate world.

My dog sighs. He’s sleeping cozily over layers of pillows. He’s named after my favorite chatmate that I’m still terribly attracted after 6 years. I thought I was done with him. But my feelings are getting another rollercoaster ride when all the feelings I’ve buried begun to resurface when I painted his portrait for my show. I must be fucking insane to even think to be in love with this guy. I mean, I haven’t even met him!!!! Now I know why Matt, the husband of Jemy (inspirational online romance couple) was thought of his neighbors as crazy when he starts telling them that he’s visiting the Philippines to meet jemy. Fucking insane.

I hate the feeling of needing. I get like this a month before a show comes. When the stress levels are up, you need to produce brilliant ideas and you are reminded of how fragile your sanity is when a certain chatmate of yours cuts you in your mid sentence to say goodbye, when all you want to do is, plead for him to stay awhile longer, humor you a bit, and at least alleviate your loneliness for a few minutes.

I was crying while painting his portrait. One of my friends knew… just one look at the painting, even if the portrait was smiling, it was still sad. And it’s true. I was crying while doing it. For the lack of understanding of what has happened. For the loss, and for the feelings that are resurrecting, that I should have had control over.

Sigh. I find no resolution in my problems.

I weep for myself tonight, but kiss my online chatmate’s forehead in the air, wishing him that he find relief from the emptiness we both carry inside.

deepestthoughts

2008-06-09T05:58:00.001-07:00

Have we met?

by Margaret Rodriguez

As technology and societies develop, cultures expand and change. One remarkable change happening right now, is how technology has altered the concept of meeting people. Our world has gotten smaller when the we sent letters via the post office , and the future took another leap when the telephone was invented. Now we have the cellphone, computers and internet. Traditionally, people met face to face to transact business, talk and fix alliances, woo and fall in love but as our options broaden by means of communication, how can we say that we’ve really met someone?

The exhibit tries to examine the nuances of the two schools of thought of meeting people: Meeting people face to face , and exploring the interaction between individuals using tools, take for example : through the mediation of the internet.

As an avid user of the internet Margaret Rodriguez delves into the medium of cyberspace as the virtual world that draws people of the same interest together, and also keeps them apart. She explores how much the internet has redefined communication and values, and people are now moving towards the abstract than the material and how computers can sometimes make a person more subtle, intuitive, expressive, creative that would have been harder to reveal in a face to face contact. She reveals these ideas by making collage portraits of the people she has known and interacted with in the internet.

She has chosen to work with textiles and handmade items to show a sense of attachment to the materials and techniques employed. This is in reaction to the proliferation of technology as she wants to portray the intimacy of relationships despite the use of synthetic tools like cellphones, computers and cable television.

Deepest thoughts

2001. Found my online soulmate. This is a representation of what i know of him. Making this painting took a lot from me,and it’s both happy and sad. I have yet to meet him. But i know it will never be the same, like the summer of 2001.

From Red Bubble site

2008-06-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Just joined red bubble, an aussie site, similar to multiply and flickr.... Looks fun!
here's some flash stuff i got from the site... Enjoy!

(patterns: again)

2008-03-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

….Patterns are indigenous to daily life like maps, patterns guide our habits, and movements, and inner clockwork, defining our personalities as they endlessly repeat and overlap….

-Graphic Design MFA Maryland Institute of Art

The Maryland Institute of Art basically summed up the gist of my exhibit where I tried to fuse Asian textile design to contemporary colors. One year ago, when I first decided to mount this exhibit, I was trying to look for a way to show my love for Indian and indonesian textiles, as well as Pacita Abad’s trapunta art. After much research, swatches and books, I thought to myself, I’ll just paint, and be open to be surprised. Sure enough I started with the long canvasses, and named them “pathways”, I literally felt as if I was –paving my way into myself, through every nook and cranny, and breezing through colors. I purposely studded my paintings with little patterns of traingles, circles and lines, reminiscent of the small things I do all the time, and how much I love to be a packrat. I love the texture of small details, like when you look at an ivory carving or miniatures. Soon enough, I was already finishing my pieces. Looking at the artworks, I could recount the small joys of the day, the ebb and the flow of the tide, the rise and setting of the sun as well as the fibonacci count of nature. I just wish I could share with you as much joy as I had painting my artworks.

things to be thanked about.......

2008-03-05T20:02:00.000-08:00

I got inspired about reading comments from blindsided about “prosperity that matters”.

It’s very hard to see my life in a macrocosmic view before, when I was still so busy in my former work. Now that I left it, not only was I able to find a different perspective of life, but also my face cleared up of my acne, and then I thought before that I needed medicines and a whole lot of trouble to save my skin. Little did I know it was just the stress (fear of not doing good, late nights and sunday work) , not the food, not the boys, or my genes.

I’m painting now, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s my husband. It’s my first love. I sometimes forget to eat not like when I was still working in advertising where stress really churns up acid in your stomach. I’m, not surprised that a lot of agency, production people and post production people are fat, drink too much, or suffer from ulcers. I don’t know why even if I work longer hours in painting, I don’t get the queasiness I usually get from advertising.

Life is much more simple now, there’s more time to live the kind of life that busy people often only resolve to live, more time to relish on afternoons of manila bay, more time to talking to friends, more time to read my books that I’ve put off as long as I could remember, more time to commit on endeavors that really have meaning in my life, more time to enjoy mc do french fries and savor the calamares of the street vendors, more time to erase the bad memories and the psyche that you’re not good enough, not desirable enough, not rich enough when you’re pitted in dog eat dog world.

I thank god I haven’t been swallowed by the system just yet. Preserve some of the idealism and innocence of people I have lost while working in a culture of two-faces, stabbing backs and egocentric bosses .I thank god also, for having met under difficult circumstances, people who are truly friends. The last quarter of 2007 was truly a revelation to me.

Yesterday, I saw my ex with a brand new girlfriend, walking hand in hand in cubao. Maybe she still doesn’t know she has other girlfriends in different places, that he wheedles money through pity and coercion, or that he is prone to violence. I was tempted to warn off the girl, when gino my good friend called to pick me up at another side of shopwise. While I was reminded of my sad fate 2 years ago with my ex, I was happy that everything was over.

There’s really too much to thank about. Thank god for that.

omens

2008-02-16T20:18:00.000-08:00

Do you believe in omens?

I was painting upstairs when i heard a loud crash emanating from the kitchens. One of our oldest plates broke into pieces from the hands of my mother. Was it a bad omen? a preview of things to come? I was never a believer of those, and shrugged off what had happened.

It was in the morning that the call came.

Lita, a household helper from one of my father's cousins, who goes to my grand aunt's house to clean during weekends discovered the demise of lola rosa. She phoned us quickly, and my dad and I quickly dropped by to survey the situation and to broadcast the news to all the relatives.

It was my first time to see a freshly dead body, and of someone I knew so well. My grand aunt was still sitting in her favorite spot in her simple dining table, still with her mouth wide open, her body hard and cold. There was remnants of her piss on the floor, which lita wiped after the funeral boys took my aunt to the funeral home. My grand aunt, lola elong was like a broken record when we found her. She had been complaining all night that she couldn't call our house, complained why lola rosa was the one taken, instead of her and how lola rosa choked, vomited before passing away. They have been together for more than 9 decades, in the same old house. Now she was all alone.

It was a common consensus that my lola elong, alone during that night, might have been rattled, with poor eyesight, could not call us though the phone and find help. Maybe there could have been something that could have been done....

Faced with death, I'm still numb from the experience. Early as now, i'm trying to think of how life will be when my parents will be older. Will they be staying with me? Is it going to be like how lola elong and lola rosa lived? The two of them having petty fights everyday and actually look forward to the arguments? Who'll go first? Mom or Dad? Or maybe me?

In the midst of all my thoughts, my mother draws me to the corner...

"Sabi ko na nga ba, baka yung basag na plato yung warning sa atin". ( I had a feeling the broken plate was an omen).

I personally don't believe it, but... what a strange coincidence.........

Happiness in a dual core format

2008-02-12T20:45:00.001-08:00

...Finally,having spent months grueling over my limping pentium 3 computer, my brother convinced my dad to buy a new computer ( I know I'm in an age where I'm supposed to be living in my own flat and buying my own pc...hehehe)... For me, this is only temporary... And should get back on track after I land a job (or sell all my paintings).

Anyway, yesterday I bought a new pc... yay! Finally! 2 gigs of ram, a dual core processor and a nvidia graphics card to finally get my old 3d stuff up and running. We still have the old monitor, but I'm not complaining. As long as the work gets done efficiently,saves when it supposed to save and not hang while your saving... AND HAVE TO REBOOT EVERY TEN MINUTES.

I am so happy ( okay... okay... almost... If the pldt guys just deliver what they promise ...which is 1mbps rather than 40kbps of dsl bandwidth everything would have been so swell) at least I've uploaded my stuff in multiply and flickr.

Now, I'm terribly thinking about freelancing instead of getting a real job (8-5 kind). And brush upon my 3d,flash skills... *hay... choices....

the 2x2 stuff

2008-02-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

After doing the long planks, i was excited to make artworks with a square size. I've been inspired by lin xiping's pallete (mid tones- to highlights), although, in my case, I still can't get out of needing to have full contrast in my work and a clean monotone feel. ... Still, I'm so happy for the final outcome.

Patterns : Metaphors of Life

2008-02-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

I've always been fascinated by patterns. When i first borrowed my father's camera in college, the first thing i would shoot are the trellis, the spiked gate tops, the ebb and flow of the tide that form the tiny sand dunes in the beach. In the same way nature follows a pattern, our lives are also governed by our natural instincts. We develop habits and daily rhythms.

I was so excited to find out about artists and artworks that pertained to patterns. I used to love van gogh (well, i still do)... his rhythmic strokes became a pattern in itself. I especially loved pacita abad with her bold colors and wild imagination. I simply had to paint after i had been showed the way.

I started with long canvasses, and the design and colors just flowed... Soon, I was on the next canvas. Nothing is as satisfying as finally finding yourself in the work that you love. I hope fate will help me continue on with my craft amidst all uncertainty.

Finally Here

2008-01-24T23:42:00.000-08:00

Daniel Tayona finally convinced me to put up a blog about art ... So here i am... I usually put up my artworks in multiply (forever pics and videos yay!) and friendster. But I usually miss out saying stuff about my art when I post it multiply.

Now that i think about it, Daniel's really lucky that he has stories to begin with when he does his paintings and drawings. I simply draw or paint by impulse.... and look at it after awhile...and build from there.

People think sometimes it's easy to paint when they see a finished product most especially with abstract paintings. Some, disdainful by the amount some pieces can be sold with so called "minimal" efforts. It's really too tiring to explain the processes and the effort that comes to building an artwork. We artists need to live, pay rent, pay the carpenters, buy expensive art supplies, produce an exhibit and contend with naysayers! I hope people can get educated by how much money, time and thought goes in producing an artwork and not just raise a brow and ask... really? that much for a bunch of globs of paint?

....Hay ... Mahirap talaga mabuhay. Anyway, I have more pics in the meanwhile here:

http://xairoise.multiply.com