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I painted watercolor “thank you” cards for medical front liners who were risking their lives at the height of the pandemic.”

By Gigi Campos

As a young wife and mother transported to Negros from Manila in the early 70s, I easily fell in love with Negros—the landscape, the people, the arts and crafts, and definitely the food. Having taken some courses in interior design at the New York School of Interior Design, I partnered with a sister-in-law and opened a home furnishing store and interior design office in Bacolod. 

In the mid-80s a monumental crisis hit Negros that caused the collapse of the sugar industry. I soon found myself involved with different NGOs. With a small group of like-minded friends, we decided to spearhead livelihood projects for displaced sugar workers in Negros. Not long after, the Association of Negros Producers was formed and I became its founding president. The ANP’s mission was to provide an alternative source of income for the farm workers by promoting Negrense heritage and crafts.  

I also set up Reeds and Weeds, a company that manufactured products made from indigenous materials. I started to train and organize communities of weavers throughout the province.  

Then I fell in love with the mosaic art of Antoni Gaudi. On a visit to Barcelona I saw his radical approach to mosaic that mixed traditional square cut tesserae with irregularly shaped pieces, from broken ceramic tiles to stained glass, to other found objects. I was challenged. I told myself, I can do this! 

Upon our return home, I lost no time and started my first mosaic installation, a 4x8-ft high mosaic image of the sun for Solana, our vacation home in Sipalay, a city in the south of Negros Occidental. I was hooked. Many more mosaic installations followed in Solana—mosaic stairs, benches, tables, and garden decor.

I found fulfillment in sharing my passion for mosaic art. I wanted the community to recognize mosaic as an art form that can be pursued by anyone with the desire and passion for art. NVC Artisans of Hope is one of the beneficiaries of my workshops. Its founder, Millie Kilayko, was one of my students. Another is Lisa de Leon-Zayco who has already had several exhibits of her mosaic work in Manila and in Bacolod.

My most meaningful mosaic workshop came in 2019. I conducted it for the children of Kalipay Negrense Foundation. I was witness to the powerful impact of art and self-expression on the children, most of whom had experienced severe trauma in their young lives. 

And then my own trauma happened.

It was a diagnosis of breast cancer that shook my world. It came like a death sentence as I always prayed to God to spare me of this dreaded disease. I was fearful of the physical pain that came with it. I guess God sometimes leads us through a dark tunnel for us to appreciate the light that awaits us on the other side. 

At the onset, I struggled with the prospect of undergoing chemotherapy. I prayed for guidance. And in the end God spoke to me through the words of a priest in a homily about the lepers Jesus healed, when he said, “healing comes after obedience.” I was surprised when the priest turned to my direction and seemed to look straight at me and said, “obey your doctors and you will be healed.”

It has been a year since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’ve been through much, physically and emotionally. I am not yet at the finish line, but Philippians 4:11-14 says, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing, or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation…with plenty or with little. For I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Through the pains and discomfort of my body, my mind kept telling me I could get through the depression, anxiety, and even cancer by doing something creative that could benefit others. I painted watercolor “thank you” cards for medical front liners who were risking their lives at the height of the pandemic. NVC, who led the project, tucked the cards among donated PPEs.

It was in my quiet moments that I discovered the magic of what life is all about. I discovered a special love for God’s creation—the beautiful blue skies, brilliant sunsets, and all the different birds and flowers in the garden. In my pain God gave me the passion to pick up my brushes and paint once again, to work with my hands and discover new crafts, and to put into words all the wonder and discovery I was experiencing. 

My art has followed the different aspects of my reality. One of these is my deep and lifelong relationships with the women in my life, relationships that have remained strong—my mother, my sisters, my daughters, and friends.

Another aspect is my faith that has inspired me to create various mosaics of the cross, entire Stations of the Cross, and images of Mary, Mother of God. My faith allowed me to travel the difficult road to healing. Ironic as it may sound, cancer gave me a renewed passion for life. It gave me the heart of a fighter, thriver, survivor.

 Multi-awarded actor Joel Torre invites you to be part of The Negros Season of Culture.

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The island of Negros always had a special place in the life, work, and art of Peque Gallaga. It was inspiration, refuge, and home, shaping his view of the world and his place in it. We pay tribute to him as we dedicate the first year of Negros Season of Culture to his memory. 

In this video, Tats Manahan talks about the work of Alfonso Ossorio, in "Not an Angry Christ".

Paquit: “You know, it was a long time before Marie began to talk.”
Marie: “It was Esther who was my yaya, very quiet.”




We have found many ways of preserving images of the past, but nothing captures the nostalgia of one’s childhood more hauntingly than cyanotype. Wikipedia defines cyanotype as a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Its discovery in 1842 is attributed to Sir John Herschel, an English scientist and astronomer. Cyanotype looks very much like the blueprint that architects and building engineers use.

 

After 39 years in the United States, Angela Silva and her husband, Chris Juricich, returned to Negros from Berkeley, California. It was then that Angela embarked on a new career as a printmaker and a visual artist using cyanotype photography. “I combine my love of vintage Filipiniana and real photo postcards with printmaking and collage. My antiquarian sensibility layers rare photographs and studio portraits with maps and ephemera to denote a sense of time and place. In my work, I also explore identity and memory by combining found vernacular photographs with remembered stories,” says Angela. This includes ordinary, everyday photos and recollections from family members as well as her own.

Luckily for Angela, she comes with illustrious history. Her maternal lineage of the Javellana-Ledesma families provides abundant memorabilia, many of which have been tapped as subjects for Angela’s cyanotype projects. “Shadow Mothers” (Orange Project 2019, The Negros Museum 2020), pays tribute to the role of “yayas” or live-in baby sitters in the Negrense culture. These endeared women took care of children while the real mothers helped in the running of the hacienda or attended to social obligations. Angela shares, “I am interested in studying the mother-and-child pose as recorded in photos of biological mothers and attendant mothers…the stories of intimate history behind them—the mothering, the nurturing, and the subsequent separation between the women and the children they held with such pride and love.”




A larger cast of characters is had in Angela’s work “Juan and Nena 1926-1927”, where the artist chronicles the yearlong courtship of her grandparents, Juan Ledesma and Magdalena “Nena” Javellana. The final work, four volumes of postcard-size photo albums, track the travels of 10 cousins and friends onboard cruise ships to North America, South America, and Europe. Nena starts the voyage with two suitors and returns home engaged to Juan—a titanic love story on its own. But this masterpiece reaches beyond recounting a private family anecdote. It reflects a period in the existence of Negrenses that has defined the place and its people. And many times, stories like this cement a community’s pride in its cultural heritage. It is Angela’s duty to recapture those snippets of travel and courtship as authentically as possible.

That cyanotype as a form of alternative photography predates the film camera commands emotional connection. Angela produces the monochromatic blue image on archival quality paper to achieve a feeling of timelessness. And because it looks very much like a blueprint, it brings the art enthusiast to the very beginning of things, the starting point, the plot of a narrative about to unfold. Cyanotype, does indeed, romance the past to make it relevant once more.

Angela Silva currently works on new cyanotype projects, including one using old passports. View what she’s up to at IG@alegnaavlis and on Facebook: Angela Silva.

The island of Negros always had a special place in the life, work, and art of Peque Gallaga. It was inspiration, refuge, and home, shaping his view of the world and his place in it. We pay tribute to him as we dedicate the first year of Negros Season of Culture to his memory. 

A cocktail of sugarcane juice, rum, and dalandan, spiked with batwan, native darag chicken skewers, locally sourced cheeses, hams, and nuts.

The grazing table is not new. It dates back to medieval times and is now making a comeback in this century, big time. In Negros, where locals would rather be served than be herded to the buffet table to queue, grazing is a welcome option. The shabby chic styling of the table is a magnet to the senses. It is sophisticated yet cozy. It says abundance, harvest time, fiesta at the hacienda! The tablescape lends well to the landscape.

Chef Mia saw the connection and quickly turned the grazing table into an indigenous Negrense concept. She included traditional food and local ingredients wherever doing so would raise eyebrows in pleasant surprise. Basic elements, like the crudité platter and the charcuterie board, are given higher calling, not just to feed but to feed with a mission.

In Chef Mia’s crudité selection one will find locally sourced vegetables, after all, we have land to plant them so there is no reason to bring them in from outside. Homegrown cucumbers and carrots and singkamas (jicama) are lent artisanal air with dips rich in organic herbs.

Chef Mia Lizares Gonzaga

Meanwhile, her charcuterie board always carries a variety of nuts but also the favorite Talisay peanuts, wedges of cheese from Murcia, cold cuts from butchers who raise their own livestock, native darag chicken skewers, fruits in season, and rustic bread baked fresh from the chef’s “pugon”. For sure there’ll be something on Chef Mia’s table that’s not from the neighborhood, but when 65% are local, you can imagine the impact she makes on backyard farmers and micro-entrepreneurs, not to mention reducing her carbon footprint.

Text by Alan S. Gensoli. Photos courtesy of KusinaMia.

The chef is not quite done. In-between the basic elements she inserts her “manuglibod” basket. The manuglibod is an itinerant food vendor who carries her offerings on a round basket tray. And from that Chef Mia takes inspiration to include local sweets and snacks on her grazing table, like fresh lumpia ubod, panara, piyayas, cassava and rice cakes, and dalandan jelly candies. To wash them all down, that sugarcane-rum-dalandan cocktail with a kick of batwan. How Negrense is that?