Today is Day Twenty-Three and I have to admit…my right eye has begun to twitch.  I haven’t had a facial twitch for quite awhile…but if any project is going to cause muscular twitches, it would be this one.

This particular painting has got to be the most colorful so far!  Well, at least the brightest.  Thanks to Pacita Abad…the wonderful artist I am honoring today.  She’s also the first Asian-American woman I’m featuring yet!  I’m pretty sure there are more to come. 🙂

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), internationally renowned, Philippine-American contemporary

painter, was born in Basco, Batanes, a small island in the northernmost part of the

Philippines. Her thirty-year painting career began when she traveled to the United States to study law in San Francisco. It was there that she decided to switch careers and dedicate her life to painting.

Since that time Pacita never stopped being a gypsy, and painted the globe while working on six different continents and traveling to more than 50 countries. During her career Pacita created over 4,500 artworks, and her paintings were exhibited in more than 200 museums and galleries around the world.  Short bio from her website.

Her early paintings were primarily figurative socio-political works of people and primitive masks. Another series was large scale paintings of underwater scenes, tropical flowers and animal wildlife. Pacita’s most extensive body of work, however, is her vibrant,

colorful abstract work – many very large scale canvases, but also a number of small collages – on a range of materials from canvas and paper to bark cloth, metal, ceramics and glass. Abad created over 4,000 artworks. She painted a 55-meter long Alkaff Bridge in Singapore and covered it with 2,350 multicolored circles. During the last five years of her life, she lived and worked in a studio house on 28 Temenggong Road in Singapore, which currently houses the Visual Arts @ Temenggong.

Abad developed a technique of trapunto painting (named after a quilting technique), which entailed stitching and stuffing her painted canvases to give them a three-dimensional, sculptural effect. She then began incorporating into the surface of her paintings materials such as traditional cloth, mirrors, beads, shells, plastic buttons and other objects.

And finally here’s my completed piece…you can probably see why I am thinking that this is

probably my brightest piece yet.  I thought about doing something more abstract, but then saw a few pieces she did featuring more tribal art/masks.  I decided to look up actual Fillipino masks and honor her culture as well.  The rest of the painting is very stream of consciousness.  I wanted to just relax and see where the colors and brushes took me.  It was very meditative and I noticed the more colors and details I added, the happier I was.  I made my last dots and then I knew I was done.  I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed painting it.  Thank you Pacita Abad, for being such a lovely woman and sharing your art with me and fellow bloggers today.

xoxo, Linda

See you tomorrow…DAY 24!  Whew.

And finally, here’s my finished piece!  I can’t imagine if I was painting a huge canvas…it would be amazing…and of course, it would’ve taken me days and days.