#coronavirus #pandemic #quarantine #frontliners… and the hashtags get worse as it progresses. These are terms that have been bombarding social media since the beginning of the year, and the rest as they say, is history. 2020 welcomes all of humanity’s current generations’ firsts. The ongoing global health crisis, thanks to the covid-19 pandemic, has turned our lives as we know it, upside down.

​

These are times that are indescribable. As we experience quarantine a.k.a. “lockdown”, a thought that was unimaginable in a not-so-distant past to say the least, we are given a seemingly unspecified amount of time to contemplate, to make sense and find meaning, to withdraw and draw inspiration, to muster all courage to find that silver lining in this crazy period of our lives.

​

As artists, finding inspiration, feeding the desire and hunger to be creative, proves difficult in a time when things seem uncertain. For members of the Filipino Portrait Artists Guild, the mere trivial act of gathering references for a painting presented its share of unforeseen challenges. As representational artists, and as portraitists specifically, getting your subject’s various nuances and configurations cannot be achieved by trial-and-error or guesswork. The artist should have a visual reference to base on, whether painting a sitter from life or using a myriad of photographs. The quarantine proved difficult for some to gather references about the subjects for the exhibit – people out in the field doing their duties in society during this pandemic. One doesn’t just deal with the physical act of going out to search for human interest pieces, but add to that the anxiety experienced as one plays hide-and-seek with an invisible foe. Therein lies the opportunity to make use of “diskarte” to snap that shot, rethinking a composition, or even combining images from various sources.

​

The next hurdle was of how to present the exhibit itself. In a very traditional setting, a brick-and-mortar gallery will always be the de facto standard in staging a show. The artist completes the works. Followed by framing, delivery and ingress. Dress to kill and entertain guests during the opening reception. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Everything was that simple. But social distancing will be the new norm, so to speak. Mass gatherings are indefinitely banned. How then, can an exhibit be launched?

​

As we all know, despite everyone being physically distant from each other, the only one thing that socially connects everyone to everyone else is the deep recesses of cyberspace. Social media in its various iterations have virtually glued us to one another. During these weeks of keeping one’s self pre-occupied, it will be forgivable if not expected to fiddle with apps and digital devices, enabling anyone to do things never thought of before. How about livestreaming for once? Or engaging in TikTok? Or even just posting one’s very first selfie in Facebook or Instagram, just because? The access to a virtual world, thanks to technology and everything in it, will have to become the next evolution in creating, presenting and consuming art. Never has any time in the life of this planet that WIFI has become synonymous to breathing oxygen to survive. Imagine your day in lockdown just staring at the wall because you have no access to that, as if you’re physically and mentally paralyzed.

​

The decision to present the group’s exhibit online was met with no issue. It was the next best thing to do given the situation. As artists, presenting one’s work both physically and virtually is not new. What is different is that the work cannot truly be cherished in its pristine, physical form. The exhibit will be done purely for an online show. That itself is a new paradigm shift from the analog mode of exhibiting artworks. One will have to appreciate the works through a screen, and I guess everyone agrees that the screen is nothing compared to the real thing. Waxing sentimentality aside, the fact that a show that is fully presented online is already a feat in and of by itself. If done improperly though, the glorious hours spent in creating the pieces might not pull its weight through under a mediocre presentation.

​

Showcasing a total of 24 works, one by each artist, the exhibit is a tribute to all Filipino men and women who are out in the field sacrificing their lives to save the rest of our countrymen. It chronicles the experiences of the ordinary folk, depicting scenes and situations during this quarantine, displaying selfless acts of heroism in extraordinary times. The exhibit is complemented by new self-portraits done in freehand. This is to veer away from the typical photo profile formats, while affording the artist a chance to record themselves in this historical moment of their lives. All done in grayscale, this became sort of an exercise to refresh one’s skills with the basics of drawing, understanding the nuances of doing a portrait in its simplest and unembellished form.

​

As things may be easing into a new normal, the work of an artist never stops. The passion to create is always there, in good or bad times. In the case of the Filipino Portrait Artists Guild, this has given the group a new sense of pride in pursuing their calling as visual chroniclers. That in going through the experiences of creating art through this pandemic, one already may consider it as an act of bravery, of refusing to bow down, of continuing to forge ahead, looking to the future with optimism that everything will get better again, and that the fact we are still alive and able to do art, is a sign of good things to come. #positivealways #cheerstoart