Biography

My childhood was spent drawing and poring over my grandfather’s issues of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest magazines. Living in a provincial town in the Philippines, I did not have access to museums and only dreamed of seeing paintings in the flesh. As an only child my companions were books and a sketchpad and I lived a very full interior world. To find myself at ten years old in San Antonio, Texas, was a cultural shock. But there were museums and big libraries and good people who mentored me before I even knew I wanted to be an artist by profession. I am almost entirely self-taught not by lack of opportunity or teachers, but because of a stubbornness to move outside of that inner world cultivated from the tenderest age.

My motivation for painting has always been to revive paintings of the past within my own pictorial language. I am a lover of art, and when I did finally see masterpieces of painting, it was a pilgrimage. I gaze at favorite artworks the way others worship a hero or a relic. I have always felt that I was born in the wrong century. My imagery would have been better suited to a time when people were aware of the mythologies associated with Olympian gods or were fluent in the Victorian language of flowers. And yet I can only have ever painted in the present for no other time in history has the plethora of images been so readily available. To sample imagery through the ages, cherry picking from the Renaissance or the Rococo for example, and to combine them into a personal narrative is unique to our times.

The need to love and be loved is a theme which has preoccupied writers and artists through the centuries. I return to it repeatedly, recalling characters from literature or opera. My invented portraits are nearly all solitary and often are of children. They are haunted by a solitude experienced by those who find themselves strangers in a strange land, simultaneously longing to escape and connect. 

As an immigrant the impulse to take root is particularly strong. I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico underneath its clear vast skies and surrounded by a community of artists and writers. It feels enchanted to me and I find traces of the Philippines in its churches, santos and Hispanic traditions.  But I also love the uniquely American Southwestern landscape. It is a place conducive to solitude and creation and an impalpable sense of belonging to nature. It feels a little out of time, not unlike the people and places of my paintings.