Eduardo Solana Jr. speaks about watercolor the way some people speak about a place they have loved all their lives: with tenderness, clarity and a quiet sense of return. In his hands, the medium becomes more than pigment and water. It is memory made visible, a language of light and restraint, a way of listening closely to the world and translating what it gives back.
His story begins in Manolo Fortich, Bukidnon, where drawing first entered his life as a child’s instinctive joy. With pencils, crayons and pastels, he sketched what he could see and what he could imagine, encouraged by a mother who understood that talent, however modest its beginnings, deserved room to grow. She bought him whatever materials she could afford and in that small act of faith, a future artist was taking shape. By high school, he was already winning awards, leading the school art club and moving confidently into poster colors and latex murals. Before college had even begun, he was working as an in-house artist for Del Monte Philippines.
Early roots and raw promise
That early promise carried him to the University of San Carlos in Cebu, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Advertising. It was there, amid the rigors of formal study, that watercolor revealed itself as his truest companion. Its fluidity, its softness, its willingness to surprise — these became part of his own artistic temperament. The medium seemed to mirror the very nature of his seeing: attentive, responsive and alive to the smallest shifts of mood and light.
A detour through the corporate world
After graduation, however, life widened into other responsibilities. Solana moved through the practical demands of work and business. Art, for a long while, survived in the margins — in spare hours, in unfinished thoughts, in the private spaces between obligations. He painted when he could and, for a time, he wondered whether the brush might eventually be set aside altogether.
Then came 2017, the year a friend’s encouragement drew him back toward the easel. What followed was not so much a return as a homecoming. The work had been waiting for him. The hand remembered. The eye remembered. And so did the need to make something honest out of what he saw.
“Painting is where my soul feels most at peace, particularly when I am immersed in the grandeur of my subject,” Solana said. “Through my watercolor sketches, I aim to tell stories and reveal the beauty shaped by both God and human hands.”
Capturing life in the open air
He works mostly outdoors, painting from life and following whatever scene calls him first: a rural horizon, a weather-beaten facade, a working boat, a quiet street at dusk. His subjects are often ordinary in the way that only deeply looked-at things can be ordinary. He draws inspiration from Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, yet his own paintings remain unmistakably his — intimate, observant and gently animated by the pulse of the moment.
“My approach is deeply observational, whether painting en plein air or in the studio,” he said. “I strive to be expressive with my brushstrokes, allowing the emotions I feel in the moment to guide the work. Each painting becomes a visual journal of the places I have seen and the people I have encountered.”
That journal has brought him recognition. He won the Grand Prize at the Philippine Guild of Watercolorists in 2020 for Mananagat and again in 2024 for The Abundance of the Sea. He also received the Sponsor’s Choice Award for The Heritage Bakeshop at Vigan and became a finalist in the International Masters of Watercolor Alliance, honors that affirmed what his work had already begun to declare: that he belongs firmly among the country’s notable watercolorists.
Fostering a creative community
Today, Solana serves as president of the Watercolor Society of Cebu, where he helps nurture a circle of artists bound together by curiosity, discipline and a shared devotion to the medium. He leads free workshops, lectures and demonstrations for emerging painters, carrying forward the same generosity that once opened the path for him.
He is looking ahead now, toward abstraction and whatever new forms the brush may yet discover. But even as his work evolves, the center remains unchanged: the patient act of seeing, the courage to begin again and the deep pleasure of watching color dissolve into meaning. For Solana, watercolor is not simply an art form. It is a way of staying in conversation with the world.