Yasmin Ortiga: The tale of a girl with kaleidoscope eyes

It was one of the few times that a drawing gripped me, slapped me around and shouted, "This is your freaking life!" The artwork (characterized by fanciful colored pencil strokes) is called "Marvin’s Stars" by 22-year-old artist Yasmin Ortiga. It shows a cramped room cluttered with an electric fan, a hamper, a closet, an electric fan, a boom box, a boy sitting on a bed and gazing at plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars… wait… a whole constellation of yellow polystyrene thingies attached to his ceiling. The open windows display the breathtaking panorama of gray depressing walls. Yasmin calls it a commentary on urban life.

"Sobrang dikit na ‘yung mga bahay to the point na wala ka nang makitang view," she explains.

The young artist says she elaborated on the synthetic star theme in a children’s story and submitted it to a writing workshop. One panelist called it "The Boy Who Settled For Plastic Stars" and found the concept too sad and not very appealing. Yasmin disagrees: "The boy doesn’t settle for plastic stars, he merely does what he can to improve his condition."

I told Yasmin that the exact same stargazing thing happened to me. Years ago, while I was asleep in my bedroom with a huge hangover, a neighbor built a sprawling wall in front of my window, covering my entire crappy view of picturesque Malabon (yeah, right) and blocking the passage of air and light. It was like waking up and finding oneself walled in like Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe (Edgar Allan – and not the wannabe President of our doomed republic). My mother couldn’t convince our neighbor the evil bricklayer to tear down the wall. I named it The Berting Wall in honor of that fascist and managed to remedy the situation by covering my ceiling with Pamela Anderson and Cindy Crawford posters – they were my stars. It was as if Yasmin saw my domestic dungeon and illustrated it, well almost. And this is practically the artist’s intention: to draw what people are going through in a whimsical yet meaty manner.

"Marvin’s Stars" is part of a series of Atsi Batsi Arts yuletide cards Yasmin drew, printed and sold last Christmas in various bazaars. She even got requests from buyers not to include that particular drawing in the packs they wanted to purchase. "I guess they found it too depressing (laughs)," Yasmin says.

She started Atsi Batsi Arts just after college. Marco, her 19-year-old brother who plays in a band called Contented Cows, was the one who came up with the name for Yasmin’s yuletide card enterprise. She relates, "He calls me ‘Atsi’ – lalo na whenever hihiram siya ng pera (laughs)."

Yasmin’s objective was to make cards not with the usual yuletide suspects like Santa Claus or Frosty the Snowman or Rudolph the Reindeer (Manila is not the frigging Winter Wonderland, anyway). She instead focused on figures and objects that can be found in contemporary Filipino life.

What I like about her cards is the fact that there are no sappy messages; it is up to the sender to pour his or her heart out on the blank space – rather than making do with "JAPAN (Just Always Pray At Night)," "ITALY (I Trust And Love You)," "Near Far Wherever You Are" and similar sentimental shit.

She took up BA Psychology in UP, finishing magna cum laude. "Ang maganda sa course ko, you could do a paper on tsismis or other everyday things pertaining to behavior and culture," says Yasmin. One of her mentors is Dr. Elizabeth De Castro who stressed the need to put one’s art into context. "She taught me that if I don’t draw one’s context, I am not truly expressing my identity."

Yasmin admits to being both observant and imaginative. She takes ordinary images, ordinary situations, and modifies them. Thus, her drawings simply do not spring from the void. "It’s fun to do art that is unique," Yasmin says, "and when it has a message that’s implied and not too obvious."

She counts children’s book illustrators like Filipino Jason Moss (Alamat ng Ampalaya) and American Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are). Like her idols, her drawings have playful but not-so blatant surrealist elements.

A guy playing a cello in a waiting shed. A girl wearing ordinary clothes and sprouting extraordinary wings. A lantern parade under delirious Van Gogh skies. A boy suffering from "thought constipation" (a phrase coined by a former classmate). A female Icarus (a haughty critic would call it "the subversion of the patriarchal mythmaking order"; she simply describes it a girl with wings flying into the sun). A boy under a "brain-cloud," with an anatomically correct drawing of a brain – well, almost according to a professor who crabbed that the hypothalamus didn’t have the right size.

The feedback she gets is overwhelming. Bencab praised one of her Atsi Batsi cards titled "Space Exploration." ("I was shaking when my dad handed Bencab the card," she says.) Her boyfriend Marvin Montefrio – who is taking up his masters in Singapore – used "Marvin’s Stars" as his laptop screen saver. When his Singaporean schoolmates saw Yasmin’s drawing, they liked it. One of them even told Marvin, "Yah, in Singapore, the buildings are so tall you can’t see the sky."

Her dad Sari Ortiga, art patron and gallery owner, is very supportive, always encouraging her to pursue her artistic muse. Yasmin, who got into drawing by copying Little Mermaid characters, grew up in a house that always had art hanging on its walls, as well as artists going in and out of its doors. Sari’s advice to her daughter who got bit by the art bug at an early age: "It’s not enough for an artist to have good hands, it’s also important to have a good head and a good heart."

And Yasmin has taken these words to heart and head, a piece of advice very essential for someone who considers drawing a part of her being. A being that strives to communicate with her fellow beings.

Yasmin will have a column in Young Star inspired by the great Larry Alcala’s A Slice of Life. Every Friday, she will present an aspect of Filipino youth culture through her whimsical yet weighty illustrations. The artist wants to correct misconceptions that malls are the only places young people go to. Thus, she will render the young ones hanging out in dim sum establishments, gasoline station groceries and such – a sort of slice of Pinoy youth life.

"I don’t want to present the youth in a stereotypical way," Yasmin says, adding that she wants to reach out to them by illustrating their present-day concerns.

Not a far-fetched notion since most of us have stories about our skies being blocked and finding redemption in phoney yet life-saving stars.

* * *

For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.