Finding life in blank chaos: Alex Maceda on her unconventional artistic path
BACOLOD, Philippines — Alex Maceda wasn't always an artist, in fact, the idea of pursuing the arts was far from her mind.
The Filipina-American now based in Joshua Tree, California grew up in the United States, but because her parents grew up in Manila, she spent just about every summer visiting the Philippines. Because of that, she considers herself a third-culture kid.
While her parents were always encouraging her creativity, it was something she never thought of as a life worth chasing.
"Honestly, there's no one in my family who's an artist, maybe distant relatives," Alex said when she sat down with Philstar.com. "I was kind of 'smart enough to go to a real school' so I didn't pursue my creative work. I just didn't have any examples, I didn't know what that life would look like."
The usual considerations in life took her to finish a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University, followed by nearly a decade in the business industry doing management consulting and mostly early-stage start-ups.
Yet somehow art never fully stepped away. Every role Alex took in business was getting more and more creative — designing interiors, doing graphic design, managing artists — and by February 2020, she decided to quit her job, not knowing what kind of world she was about to plunge into.
"I had plans to come to Manila for three months, live in Siargao and do yoga, but I had to cancel my trip because of the pandemic," Alex admitted, leaving her trapped in her San Francisco apartment.
She then took up painting as a hobby which led to starting an art Instagram account. Next thing she knew had sold a painting, and then another painting... all of which led to her career now as a professional artist.
Within the past several months, her art has taken her to Miami and Los Angeles, as well as art residences in Greece and Iceland, "I always had this passion for art that was kind of in the background that came into the foreground during the pandemic, really."
'Unrealistic dream'
In a way, the pandemic only fast-tracked what Alex planned in her life when it came to the arts. At first, it was going to be a retirement plan, not a full-fledged career.
"I always said, 'Oh when I retire, I'm gonna be an artist,' because it felt like such an unrealistic dream that I wasn't even pursuing it," Alex told Philstar.com.
Back in her corporate life working for start-ups during the day, she would go to art classes in the evening and do art on the weekends, all with the idea that being an artist wasn't a feasible career.
Beyond having no role models to look up to, creatively that is, she finds being an artist a very vulnerable thing. What reassured her mind about it was another activity she does on the side — writing.
"My writing and personal essays are all non-fiction, there's so much like self-sharing that I do, so I had to do a lot of personal work for that before I was able to really pursue art," Alex shared.
But once she started, time seemed to pass by quickly. After two years just painting on her own and then moving to Joshua Tree, things picked up for her in a way, unlike most traditional artists.
"For a time I didn't have any gallery shows and I was selling my work all on my own, but as I continued to do that, I got more and more noticed," she added.
Life in the desert
Like most traditional artists though, Alex started as an oil painter, but upon realizing that such material is hard to travel with, she shifted to using watercolors.
"I loved the effect of watercolor on paper — the bleeding, you can't control it as much, it's more about letting go and I love that tension where I'm the artist with the brush but so much is out of my control," Alex explained.
These days, she paints with acrylic washes on unprimed canvas, allowing her to mimic some watercolor effects on a large scale, "[I can control the blending] a little bit, but there's still a lot of chaos."
With Joshua Tree located in California's expansive Mojave Desert, Alex works with the desert heart that lets her literally tell how dry or wet her work is, but in the process, she has to be present with her paintings non-stop.
"My art is very inspired by nature and spirituality, which for me are pretty intertwined, and literally it's my environment in Joshua Tree," she said of her current residence where she sees the sunrise on one horizon and the sunset on another.
"People think of the desert as this dry, barren landscape where everything is dead, but living there I experience it as very alive," Alex continued. "Even when you picture the desert, it's just brown — one swath of color — but living there, it's much more dynamic and that's what I bring into my artwork."
Speaking of colors, her primary inspiration is the sky which is obviously very blue but notes that sunsets have all kinds of colors and she even compared them to the famous Manila Bay sunset.
"You can have super bright orange contrasted with blue. I watch the sunset every day, so the dynamism of the colors changing so quickly is very inspirational to me," Alex carried on, mentioning that the sun is an apparent part of her work.
As she mostly paints outside, the sky on her abstract paintings changes with the seasons — in the summer, the paint dries faster so there are more distinct lines and layers, whereas in the winter, paintings are more saturated whenever she has to move indoors and paint doesn't dry as quickly.
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Even when her works aren't inspired by the desert, the feeling of how they are remains. She admits that in the past year, nearly all her works are inspired by the desert.
Digital directions
Having a background in business and start-ups also let Alex stand out further from traditional artists in another way, being able to navigate digital art and the industry of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Alex has done every possible combination of digital art — sold an image of a physical painting, sold an NFT plus the physical painting, experimented with digital artworks that are never printed, digital artwork as a print.
"While I identify as kind of a spiritualist who lives in nature, I also identify as a technologist, and I've always been fascinated at how technology just influences our lives in every single way," she shared.
While she admitted there is a lot of bad in the influence of technology, Alex believes there's a lot of good, too.
What attracted Alex into the NFT space — royalties, artists being in control of their destiny — were parts of the traditional art world that she finds negative for creatives like gatekeeping and galleries taking huge cuts from artists' works.
As a relative expert in business, she got into the NFT space pretty early yet still took a while to actually dive into it: "I don't want to live in a world where everything's digital, I love the physical."
But Alex found a sort of compromise, at their very core, paintings are images one sees but not everyone has space in their house for such artworks and a lot of people consume images all the time onscreen.
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"So who am I to fully impose how you experience my art? Some people want to experience it on canvas, some on print, and some are just comfortable on a screen," Alex continued. "And if that's how they want because they don't want to own the physical piece, then more power to them."
Owning vs seeing
In relation to that, Philstar.com asked Alex what mattered more to her—people owning her artworks or them simply getting to see them. Her reply wasn't one or the other.
"Honestly, what matters most to me as an artist is I like the feeling of having an emotional effect on somebody. This comes from my personal experience of being moved by artwork and seeing works where I go. Whoever made this feels the same thing as me," Alex explained.
She emphasized the human connection expressed through what is seen, which is what she strives for in her own work.
All the same, Alex admitted feeling very touched when somebody owns an artwork of hers. She estimated that she has sold between 50 to 100 paintings in the past three years, and she still finds it shocking whenever someone purchases a piece.
"I'm like, 'Oh wow you're putting that in your home, you want to see that painting every day?'" she said, comparing it to the experience of seeing the paintings in her parents and grandmother's houses which have witnessed things for her family.
"I've sold a lot of paintings to recently-married couples who are finishing their first house or even during the pandemic, I sold paintings to women who are having their own home office for the first time, so it feels very personal when someone buys a painting," Alex continued. "'This is your space and it's becoming part of what you see,' it's an amazing feeling to me."
Yoga still on her mind
Painting has taken Alex around the United States and to several parts of Europe, but it has yet to take her to the Philippines.
In fact, when Philstar.com met with Alex, it was her first visit back to the country since the pandemic began, and she was here for her grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary and renewal of vows.
Still, she is keeping her fingers crossed that one day, a future visit to the Philippines will be for work rather than simply just for a summer trip or vacation.
"I have trust everything [happens] in divine time, but I hope by the end of the year or early next year," Alex said of her projected timeline.
Philstar.com ended by asking if doing yoga in Siargao was still on the table for her, "I would love to. My dream is to be in Siargao painting and doing yoga because it's part of my art practice in that I do it every day and puts me in the right mindset to paint."
Alex explained that she experiences painting like a ceremony wherein she meditates and prays beforehand to have a clear channel and headspace.
She's been poking around but as far she knows, there aren't any art residencies in Siargao... yet.
"If I can convince someone to let me come stay there, paint for their restaurant, teach yoga, that would be the dream," Alex finished, smiling with a twinkle in her eyes.
