Sunday, January 13, 2013

Among the delightful purchases of art I have ever done were the three oil works by the superbly talented painter Waling Waling Gorospe from her exhibit "Storage Stories" held from January 6 to 28, 2012 at Finale Art File in Makati City, the Philippines.

Waling Gorospe was born in 1966 and graduated in 1986 from the University of the Philippines (U.P.) in Diliman, Quezon City with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Major in Painting) degree with Cum Laude honors.

Why I liked these three small oil paintings? The imageries are delightful, cheerful, with vibrant colors like red and yellow gold, and celebrating music. There's also a wonderful background story, which was on the wall during the exhibit and which I also got. I will look for the story and share it here....












Here was the description of her art exhibit:

Stories from Sojourns

Waling Gorospe’s latest collection of works is a contemplation on containment. Tangibly-rendered images of suitcases, bags, and trunks—filled to the brim—occupy center space in her works, packed and pregnant with narratives from the past.

‘Storage Stories’ quietly conveys the artist’s fascination with these objects: her musings on what empty luggage and bags must have once contained and her questions about forgotten things packed in bags, long covered with dust. The encounter with such signs is inevitably physical as well as symbolic: Gorospe herself migrated recently to another continent and has had to face the task of dealing with boxes, suitcases, bric-a-bracs, useless things, and special junk along the way. The artist writes:

So many stories [are] attached to objects by their keepers. Most people can look at somebody else’s collection with indifference. But, sometimes, an encounter with an object not your own can remind you of a past experience– a friendship, a trip, a worry.

Her paintings represent these objects not merely as inanimate vessels but also as signs of a sojourn: a containment of intangible, immaterial stories and sentiments throughout the years and a chronicle of sites and people encountered along the way.

The paintings take on the challenge of reminiscing, retelling, and de-cluttering: unpacking forgotten memories to clear the way, to be finally void of the past and all the weight that it carries. In the end, Gorospe’s art enables us to find solace in such strange comfort: uncovering a transitory spell of time when one world begins as another ends.


Other art works of Waling Gorospe in that same show are shown here below, not in any order:



This was one of my favorites, but already bought! Still, I admire and appreciate this art work....




More art works...