i love los angeles

midwest highways

this is very old, but it's part of a larger story, one which I plan on having resolved by July in time for the Comic Con 2008.

guardian angeles & the starlets of la la land

in the city of angels there are thousands of lost souls.

a beautiful guardian angel, plump and healthy with desire, watches over the hungry lanky girls who dream of being starlets, although sometimes they cannot save them before it's too late.

bay area love

how do you draw paradise?

skully girl

all of these little pen and ink sketches have to become either a big drawing or a painting soon. i love my moleskin, but the art has to start living outside of its box soon.

lady guadalupe offering on the first of june

...drawn in a bustling Los Angeles Mexican restaraunt. There were so many interesting people there!

woman walking down the street

ciggy bug

escaping Manila

Climbing up the top of the mountainside on the back of the motorcycle holding onto uncle J's waist. The air is vibrant and wonderfully fresh. We ride through a rainfall briefly, but in the heat the rain is refreshing and we weave in and out of tricycles and jeepneys full of people staring back or not noticing us...

Uncle J knows that I like adventure, and he carefully explains to me what things are. Without his explanations the neighborhoods melt into themselves, meaningless.

Everywhere on the outskirts of Pasig is a strange beaten housing project that looks like it's falling aapart. Unfortunately the storms destroyed most everything, leaving only rusty wire skeletons. And inbetween the streets endless, endless roads full of so many people, and houses, illegal and legal, filling up every single available crack of space. In the heat the people always look a little sweaty and thirsty, walking around in flip flops and shorts and with small bodies just like mine, their skin darker than mine from the year round sun. There are always little stores where children and women gather to buy strings of candy and soda pop and gossip at white plastic tables.

As the city melts away into the countryside, I'm amazed at how we can ride through a small rainstorm and not feel wet. Leaving Manila we climb up an increasingly lush mountainside and encounter a thick forest and jungle, a foilage that is so exotic and pleasing to my eye. Kutu is the name of the homes on the sides of the mountain, some of them perched at dizzying drops with tin roofs or the nipa huts woven from palm trees.




Every so often we stop at military checkpoints and show papers to prove that nothing is stolen. The police wear heavy uniforms in the heat and have gigantic guns. Everyone is always sweating, except when we are moving, and then it becomes paradoxically cool.

I feel instantly anxious around these men, and my uncle is properly deferential, showing them the papers. They are type a macho men, they strut back and forth with sneers and the knowledge that they can squish us.

At a small mountain house we stop for me to use the bathroom. There's a house full of girls, some of them watching a Mexican telenovela dubbed into Tagalog, drowsy in the heat.

I pass through their living room and see clothes folded neatly in tables, a large crucifix hanging from the wall. This is their life: naked, spread out in film star magazines and girl's panties folded in neat piles. When I walk out I thank them and they smile and wave at us.

I still remember the girl's sleepy eyes as she leans against the side of the hut. Clear plastic bottles dangle from the eaves of the hut stuffed with flowers, how clever!

Clever like the people bent over in rice fields wearing basketball shorts and heavy long-sleeved shirts and rice hats to shield themselves from the sun. My uncle tells me that it's hard work, backbreaking work, and it pays almost nothing. The people in the fields have soggy feet all day, I imagine.

When we ride back into the city and neighboring towns, there are huge jeepneys full of people, all of them always staring back, sometimes none of them noticing us. I like this feeling of being invisible to everyone. Manila sprawling out is an incredible tangle of humanity, of small running children in school uniforms and old men pulling wagons.

When I put on my motorcycle helmet, my face is hidden, and I am completely forgettable. I wonder how long it would take for me to completely fit in there, to be reabsorbed into the island of Luzon. I imagine myself sinking in up to my neck in the wet tropical earth, carrying plastic bags of food at night or selling things at the big cement-topped markets. I am good with numbers and marketing, what would it be like to lay out a row of objects on a flat tabletop instead of digital slippery things?

It's a strange thought, but somehow it could work. Anything is possible, right?

bulgaria road trip

all day on the airplane

cafe sketch in January

somehow the horrible outfit looks ok in this drawing! pen and ink makes everything a bit more elegant.

the uffizi

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

-- Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

• I like to eavesdrop on tour groups speaking in English or German. It's a nice summary. The tour guides are always young, very earnest, well-dressed because they usually don't need the jobs (at least the ones that work in museums). In the back of their minds they are wondering if the people they guide are absorbing everything they say. It's always amusing to see them try to seize control of their tourists when the tourists start wandering away.
  
• The disarming thing about the Uffizi in Florence is that for hundreds of years famous artists from far and wide travelled long distances (relatively long in those days) to see the paintings I went to see. Even Dürer was a tourist there. To slog through the mountaings and villages, and to not have the benefit of the internet or color photographer or offset printing: it must have been an emotional event to finally gaze at all the paintings!
  
• I like to sit down and stare at a painting for 20 minutes. A lot of people stand. When I am standing I start noticing all of the other people entering the gallery, especially what colors they are wearing, and what they are talking about. Nobody was particularly clever nor particularly stupid, but in a place as crowded as the uffizi they were a big pashima shawl blob, and it was hard to get a view of many art pieces.

Florence in the Rain

It was raining really hard, and for some reason we kept bumping into Filipino people in Florence. It's not something I'm used to, but it evokes strange emotions in me: I feel at once safe, at home, and then a little nervous, because suddenly I feel like they know everything and that I have no privacy. This time we were on our way to the goth bar, bumping into one of the student areas with communism posters and girls with nose rings.

And on a long street we trailed a Filipino woman taking her son home from school, and from behind I thought, "Oh, she must be about my age, but I look so much younger." It must be the child, no? Even when I go to Asia, people remark that I look remarkably young. Perhaps once you give birth, the child sucks the life out of you and makes you grow heavier and wrinkled and frumpy. At about this age many women, like the woman in front of me, start to cut their hair short and perm it into strange feathery layers, something I could never quite understand, but which I know would age me 15 years in a moment.

In the rain we could not hear her words, but she was not walking the walk of a relaxed and happy woman. She was lecturing her son, but about what I don't know. She veered suddenly into a calling center. We got lost looking for the bar, and then we turned the corner and saw her again in the window. (Why do people still go to calling centers in this age of skype?) Her son was playing and sitting at a table, and she was calling someone. I never saw her face, but how did I know? her son's face? What was she doing here? Was she born in Florence?

What were her dreams? As a young child, what had she thought her future would be like? Did she read poetry and drink wine until she passed out on the weekends? Did she love passionately and sing songs? What was it that she wanted to give to her son that she never had, and what expectations did she have for her child that he would most certainly reject or not fulfill? Would her son, growing up in Europe, ever understand her or her culture? Would he grow up and think of himself primarily as a European, only to be happily delighted, confused, dismayed, elated and surprised to fly to Manila and be surrounded by millions of people who looked like him and reminded him of his parents?

In the rain, passing by, she was a blur, gone forever. We proceeded to go to a bar where everyone wore black and played sad, sad chanson music. I suppose I have not been drawing enough lately. I need to practice more. You get so lazy once you have a good digital camera, but photography is so fun for me, with so few expectations. There's room for both, I guess.

Walking back, through the heavy rain we ran into a little Italian rebel girl with punk rock patches... she was not holding an umbrella. She was too cool for that. I was so happy to see a girl like that... there will always be girls like that, headstrong and defiant and always wearing a little too much make-up and going about things their own way. If I ever have a child, and I am not sure that I ever will, I want my daughter to be like that, free of fear from the world and a little too wild to keep everyone happy.

My happiest moment was when my husband turned to me and said that he, too, loved the Uffizi. He is not an uncultivated person, but I know that going to museums is a drag for some people. Enjoying something so beautiful and with such history at the same moment as another person... it's really a great thing. We hiked up the hill in the Boboli gardens, thirsty (why do I always feel so thirsty when I travel in Europe?) and trailed by snarling, fighting British couples dressed much more fashionably than us. They did not persevere... we lost them when we reached the hill, then took a side detour and found another set of gardens that gave us what we were looking for, one of the best views in the city! It was a great moment. There was a weird episode where I was trapped in a mysterious elevator, but that's a story to tell on another day. So many had tried, and while they did not fail, they ended their journey early for some strange reason.

sketchbook :: ostkreuz

derivative

mode in london

leo skizzen

Pass auf! die Strassen von Berlin werden von vampirhaften Teenagers bedrängt! Ihre weisse Gesichte können überall gesehen worden

hair alive

she sleeps in the forest

she sleeps on the floor of the forest with the flower in her arms

soon her lover will come for her, come for her

he told her to wait and that's what she'll do