Mona’’s hothouse blooms

Unusual flowers abound in the tropics. Philippine forests’ teem with blossoms of curious beauty that are full of textures and smell pungent at times.

In Europe, botanists and horticulturists take pains to grow tropical blooms in hothouses, even when temperate conditions outside are at their harshest.

In Mona’s recent solo exhibition at the Finale Art Gallery, her works, as usual, evoked a sense of splendor. Her brush strokes were painterly, creating an illusion of photographic realism. At the same time, they revealed her ability to compose complex subjects. The resulting works were abloom with a wild array of flowers found in nature rather than the living rooms of the rich and famous.

Mona’s work has been likened to American painter Georgia O’Keefe’s large-scale paintings of flowers. Perhaps this is true to some extent. She has used O’Keefe’s paintings as reference on some occasion but ultimately their goals were different.

While O’Keefe focused on large single flowers for the sake of painting them, Mona’s works are concerned with composing an array of flowers arranged more naturally with dark backgrounds. Her enlarged floral images, such as that in "Blooms I" and "Blooms II," have an older and more classical attribution. The play of light and shadow, for instance, is akin to chiaroscuro, a technique much beloved by Renaissance artists to add drama to their paintings. Such method of painting brought the importance of creating an illusion of depth to a two-dimensional surface. In addition, her floral subjects have been part of still life repertoire that became even more predominant during 17th century Europe.

All these impressions notwithstanding, Mona definitely put her mark on those famous subjects. It is the sensuousness of her paintings that brought out every texture, every imperfection or pollen dust on the petals. She lays bare the tactile qualities of the flowers’ surfaces not only with her brush strokes but also with her incredible palette that bring out an illusion of three-dimensional images. Rather than simply mix her paints on the palette, Mona applies them in layers to bring out the colors of her floral subjects.

Her paintings of flowers isolate them to the extent that she featured them in detail and magnifies them many times over. Mona’s subjects however dealt less directly with the botanical characteristics of tropical flowers such as orchids and anthuriums. Rather what she noticed and drew our attention to were the parts that made up the flowers’ imperfect beauty and their resonance in our environment. Her triptychs in the exhibition, "Blooms" and "White Blooms" represented these concerns. It seemed that her commercial art activity in the past had informed her paintings in the way she places importance in their design, patterns and colors. The idiom Mona used comments on the painterly evocation of her subject. Her insistence of continuing with her floral paintings after nearly eleven years as an artist, suggests that she is poking at the usual stereotype image of a woman painting flowers. Mona actually celebrates her being female without having to brandish it around like a weapon.

Mona, whose full name is Mona Lisa Reyes Santos, trained in visual communication and worked in the advertising industry. Family obligations and her own desire to focus on painting led her away from the demands of commercial art. She has been married to fellow artist Soler for nearly the same time she has worked as a professional painter. With three growing children, Mona takes pleasure in painting while raising her young family. Admittedly when she is in her studio and her children are at school, she loses track of time as she employs her painstaking painting method. With Soler, she has been running the West Gallery since 1989. The gallery has gained renown as a space that gives opportunities for young artists to exhibit and gain that crucial early exposure to the art world.

Mona has an impressive track record of group and solo exhibitions and feels she has yet to exhaust her floral subjects. She and Soler have exhibited their work together as they both paint subjects from nature. They both advocate the preservation of our natural environment by calling our attention to the fascinating colors, shapes and textures of their subjects. After just having had her first solo exhibition in 1993, Mona participated in the 14th Asian International Art Exhibition that was organized by Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan. She hopes to continue her technical collaboration with Soler and other artist-friends besides preparing for future solo exhibitions.

Mona is not a member of any women’s artist group because she believes it makes women more peripheral. She sees the struggle for survival in the Philippines and conservation of the environment encompassing women’s concerns. Keeping a garden and making her surroundings pleasant and livable attest to her nurturing spirit. Those blooms inspire her to pursue her artistic passions. Mona’s paintings reveal sensibilities of women painters, not merely because of the subject, but because of the diligence with which she has applied to her work. When her paintings are ready, they much resemble the extraordinary beauty of hothouse flowers coaxed to blossom even in adverse conditions.

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