Elemental landscape

CEBU, Philippines - A homecoming exhibit by Joya Award-winning artist Janine Barrera-Castillo, titled "Elemental Landscape," was featured at Qube Gallery last month. It showcased the artist's abstract expressionist paintings.

Consisting of 13 select works, the exhibit was a sampling of Castillo's contemporary non-representational oeuvre - with each piece clearly bearing the trace of its very process of creation,  process-oriented.

In the arena of the arts, there are two dominant byways which artists follow in the making of art - the content-oriented and the process-oriented approach.

In the content-oriented approach, an artist visualizes beforehand how a particular work would appear before working on it - working with a predefined subject and an array of creative techniques and styles in rendering a visual tableau into form.

In the process-oriented approach, an artist starts a work without a preconceived subject in mind - finding the 'finished work' as he or she works on it.

"Elemental Landscape" presents Castillo's process-oriented landscapes, underlining how the artist - who had built a reputation for fine-tuned content-oriented pieces some 25 years back - has grown from crafting detailed representational portraits and scenic views.

Working with a palate of vivid colors, Castillo captured the temporal awe-inspiring aspects of nature in this collection - infusing her personal views and her process-oriented responses to Mother Nature's vivid and elementally profound aspects.

Castillo finished her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines Cebu in 1984. In 1983, she won the "Representational" and "Abstract" categories of the Joya Awards competition - an annual art competition held in honor of National Artist Jose T. Joya. She won another Joya Award in her senior year in 1984.

After finishing her bachelor's degree, she went to UP Diliman to work on her masters degree. Her masters thesis revolved around the theme "The Negation of Color" - a theme which somewhat went against some of the lessons she learned from one of her mentors in Cebu, the "dean of Cebuano painters," Martino Abellana.

In 1986, she studied at the Academy of Arts in San Francisco, after qualifying for a scholarship from the Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr Foundation. "Elemental Landscape" was her first solo show in Cebu since she left.

The homecoming exhibit heralded Janine Barrera-Castillo's return to Cebu's visual arts scene and her return to the dominion of vibrant colors, shades and hues. The show ran from July 9 to 25. (FREEMAN)