Women and planets in red

Breaking off from an email discussion on a particular shade of red, I thought of taking a picture, in detail, of a painting that has been hanging on our sala wall since a year and a half ago, a gift from the artist Cristina “Kitty” Taniguchi.

I emailed the photo and it turned out to be exactly the shade of red that a friend was looking for. I wouldn’t know what the hue is called, technically, in the color scale: a very dark red as the dress of the woman subject typical of Taniguchi’s paintings.

Kitty Taniguchi’s “The Whisper”

In semi-lotus position, the meditative lady has her hands crossed where her legs meet on the floor. A serpent’s head hovers above her own, near a wired halo, while small griffons are on her side below a large planet. Red apples provide balance on the other side. Angels’ wings are also prominent behind her. The painting is titled “The Whisper.”

I recalled another, much larger painting done by Kitty many years ago, which hung on a wall of Mariyah Gallery that she had established in Dumaguete City way back in 1992. That work was an abstraction that was predominantly in red, a brighter shade. It served as the backdrop for a video interview I conducted with “Mom” Edith Tiempo when she was declared a National Artist for Literature.

In those years, Kitty would offer Mariyah Gallery as a venue for readings and socials for the writers’ workshop. She has always been a generous artist. When I helped edit a coffee-table book of paintings with women as subjects, published by Carlos Arellano, she quickly complied with submissions of her large paintings, mural-sized, in triptych. And for the “Chromatext” group shows at the CCP Main Gallery, she’d be among the first of poets’ artist-friends in the regions who would send a piece for the exhibit.

In the past several years, whenever friends were invited to furniture sculptor Karl Aguila’s hilltop home overlooking Tambobo Bay an hour south of Dumaguete, there we would relish dining on a terrace flanked by a couple of guardian lions in terracotta. These were created for Karl and Phanie by their friend and neighbor Kitty.

I say neighbor because apart from the Mariyah Gallery which also serves as her home and studio, Kitty had acquired land right across the Aguilas’ in Siit, Siaton, and built a modest structure for weekend outings and workshops.

Kitty’s “Portrait of An Artist,” oil and acrylic on canvas, 169x248 cm, 2015

In any case, that happenstance incident involving a shade of Taniguchi red eventually led to revived communication with Kitty. There was also fresh reason to do so. She and her brother Danni Sollesta have been erecting a kiln at Mariyah Gallery, and its progress certainly looked fascinating via photos posted on FB.

Danni’s the original sculptor and terracotta expert. A few years back, I photographed his monument of the Visayan revolutionary hero Leon Kilat on horseback. It’s right beside the Bacong town hall, in front of which the original statue of homeboy Leon, a.k.a. Pantaleon Villegas, has stood on a vast lawn, parallel to Rizal’s. I asked Danni’s permission to include his new rendition as an additional photo for the new edition of my novel Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, which features Leon Kilat as the legendary central protagonist. 

Kitty became a professional artist soon after her college years in Silliman U. She and Danni collaborated on an exhibit at the Silliman library lobby while she was still pursuing her M.A. in Literature in 1984. Five years earlier, as a Mass. Com. student, she had won an on-the-spot painting competition, with an old campus building as her subject.

She recalls already doing art when she was a little kid — line drawings while telling stories to entertain her cousins in Manila when they were living in her grandmother’s house in San Juan before her family moved to the Visayas.

For his part, during his college days, Danni was doing pen and ink drawings and watercolors. He eventually went into sculpture between his Master’s studies in Anthropology and starting married life. He used stone, cement and wood, and eventually focused on terracotta, on which he did intensive study by doing works with potters in a community in San Carlos City, his wife Nova’s hometown.

Danni introduced Kitty to the medium after she had started doing reliefs on wood. She came to love freestanding sculpture and installations of terracotta reliefs. Now she also does large clay skeletals for casting in bronze or copper.

The large kiln they’ve constructed with refracted bricks is for large sculpture, which they found difficulty achieving with a previous makeshift kiln. Now they’re also looking forward to producing bricks and tiles, and considering reviving a former residency program involving clay.

Where her paintings are concerned, Kitty acknowledges that the woman has always been a central subject matter. She says the reason for this is basic.

“I know her. Fascination with myth comes naturally in my psyche. I love to imagine the larger-than-life stories of women in mythology, like Medusa or the mythical Eve in the Bible. Their stories become a point of departure for me to be able to create a personal mythology — like taking my own space in the Biblical paradise, or presenting my artistic iconography in my make-believe world of dreams, even of the real world. I think those points of departure give that sense of integrity to my stories, imagined or not.”

Initial influence went back to medieval and Renaissance art, before she caught up with the modern.

“Now I prefer postmodernism. I think it’s more comfortable to work within the reality of experience. In terms of content, I can relate more with postmodernist discourse. But I’ve held on to my other influences, which include the Bible as literature, as well as studies of mythology. I’m currently at work on a couple of series where I try to exclude the human figure as much as possible. At some point in time, drudgery comes, and the artist feels burned out, that is, with a particular subject.”

Three large works have just been accepted for inclusion in the Worldwide Art-Artavita Gallery at Art Expo in New York in April 2017. The Art Residency house of Ljubisa Vecanski in Panchevo, Serbia is also waiting for her and Danni to finalize a schedule for a one-month residency. She had been there in 2014.

Cristina Sollesta Taniguchi has also participated in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Beijing International Art Biennales from 2005 to 2008, the 12th China Changchun Sculpture Symposium in 2011, the 5th Luxor International Painting Symposium in 2012 in Luxor, Egypt, and the International Art Symposium 2013 in Udaipur, India.

She has exhibited in Serbia, Liverpool in England, Bangkok, the Chang Mai University Art Museum, and New Jersey, USA, apart from the Ayala Museum, the CCP, the Pinto Art Gallery and Museum in Antipolo, and various other local venues.

Distinctions have included the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards in 1994, 2000 and 2003, and the 2009 Garbo sa Bisaya Award given by the Visayas Biennale. Among her works’ numerous collectors have been Far East Bank, Siliman University De La Salle University, the Miriam College Museum, Cebu Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archeology, Rowan University in New Jersey, Dr. Patrick Chua, Dr. Jaime Laya and Rajo Laurel.

Kitty has also passed on her creative genes to her daughter Maria, a young artist who’s been rising fast with her own early accomplishments. After a BFA in Sculpture from UP Diliman and an MFA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths in London in 2009, Maria joined the LUX Associates Artists Program, a post-academic program based in London for artists working with the moving image.

She has received successive Ateneo Art Awards for her exhibits of large-scale “brick” paintings, video installations, drawings and photographic work. Last year, she won the 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award for Emerging Asian Artists at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. This year, Maria Taniguchi will be in residency at Things That Can Happen in Hong Kong, and also have her first solo show in London at Ibid Projects, in partnership with Silverlens.

Kitty recalls: “When she was much younger, Maria said she wanted to study genetic engineering. But on her second year at Silliman High School, she started cutting classes, and would be found sitting under the trees in campus. Then she told me that she would give me grades of 78 if I didn’t look for a school she liked. I started calling friends and was informed about Philippine High School for the Arts in Makiling. It was also timely, as a group was in Cebu giving exams to interested applicants. She got in, and from then on she has managed to be on her own. She has a totally different terrain in art-making. I’m so happy for her.”

So are we. The world of the Sollestas and Taniguchis that began in our own beloved if adopted hometown of Dumaguete has kept expanding, so far afield. From Danni Sollesta’s army of lean women in terracotta standing faceless on a pond at Mariyah Gallery, to Cristina Taniguchi’s lions guarding a splendid view of Tambobo Bay, and now Maria Taniguchi’s moving images catching fire everywhere, it is a world that sources its sustenance to irrepressible, evolving creativity.

We may now see less of ladies in red among Kitty Taniguchi’s impressive iconography, as these give way to red planets and other mythological metaphors, such as in her recent painting, “Cheetah, Crow and Blue Chair.” But the changes are healthy, and ever-expansive.

I wish the best for her and Danni’s high-fire kiln, which will surely produce more works to further a stirring genealogy.