I have never met anyone who has dabbled — and succeeded — in so many creative forms as this woman who is of my generation.
While most of us graduated from high school still uncertain of what path to take, Pau, as she is fondly called, had already opened a boutique in the downtown area of Cebu City and was designing clothes and shoes, which she outsourced to Carcar once an order was made. After a stint in fashion merchandising in the U.S., she came home and enrolled in mass communications.
The Paulina Constancia boutique was just a stone’s throw away from the studio where artists congregated, so she decided to take a short course on art from the likes of Celso Pepito and ended up being part of the first CAI (Cebu Artists Incorporated) group. This included Adeste Deguilmo, Benjie Goyha, Tonette Pañares, and even the late Tito Cuevas. While she started her journey painting realism, she soon realized it was not her cup of tea. She found her own style and was advised by more senior painters to mount her own solo show.
By 1992, she was not only painting and drawing; she also tried her hand at metal design — welding her way to whatever she wanted to create. She also had a gift for words, weaving poetry into her creations. One day, she found herself involved with the Sala Foundation, where she learned to play the flute and immensely enjoyed the high of performing with an orchestra. She fondly remembers that during one of her solo exhibits at Montebello Villa Hotel, the legendary Ingrid Sala Santamaria showed her support by arriving in style—bringing her own piano—to perform for the exhibit’s visitors.
After interviewing renowned artist Nune Alvarado in 1995, he invited her to mount a joint exhibit with him in various locations around Manila. By the time she was 27 years old, she had already held a solo show in New York.
One day in 1997, she decided to write the editor of Reader’s Digest for the opportunity to share her work and was surprised to find that her piece was chosen as their back cover. The painting, “Environmental Strings Calling,” portrayed the meeting of humans and animals, with music as the instrument beckoning them to reunite. This opened more doors for Pau, and soon she received a three-month artist grant in Vermont.
While spending time in the U.S. at the Academy of Arts in San Francisco, her teachers encouraged her to return home, feeling she was already a success at her craft. But her yearning as an eternal student soon crept up on her again. This time, she went to Mexico’s Northern Highlands for several months and immersed herself in learning all she could about ceramics. She felt so at home there, surrounded by warm hearts, that she began to wonder why her self-directed exile felt like visiting a “previous life.” Eventually, it dawned on her that ceramics were hard to transport, so she shifted to textiles as her base for ease of movement.
Around the year 2000, to celebrate the long-standing relationship between Cebu City and Haarlemmermeer, Pau found herself in Holland, where she also actively joined music events. As some of her siblings had by this time migrated to Canada, Pau followed suit and filed an application as a cultural contributor. After being initially rejected — and finding her way to Kentucky, where she spent three months painting ceramics to bide her time — her admission was finally granted. When she made the shift to becoming a spouse and then a mother, she had to pause her artistic pursuits and focus on her family.
The decision to move to Singapore was made because she wanted her child to be nearer her hometown. When her son started attending school, she also began teaching “kiddie art.” She shares that the COVID-19 pandemic was a challenging time for her — as it was for all of us — but also productive, as her work became the featured cover of the Naif Art Festival in Poland in 2020. Soon after, she embarked on a traveling art show entitled Moments of Motherhood, which portrayed the many facets of this stage in a woman’s life. One of the inspirations for this project was her Japanese neighbor, who was a quilter.
An invitation to visit Slovenia in 2016 for a meeting of naif artists was an eye-opener for Pau. The organization that invited her had been hosting selected artists for the past 50 years, celebrating them at each stop. She realized that many Slovenians wanted to meet international artists so much that the towns pooled resources to contribute to the cost of hosting them. More recently, Pau also had the opportunity to visit the coffee region of Colombia as part of a community art residency group.
When I asked her what the moving force behind her artwork was, her reply offered a peek into her soul.
“You have to tell your own personal story, your fingerprint. It is important to know what you want to say and how you want to say it because, in the end, it is all about your story. If people do not get it, it’s okay. Create to connect, build communities. To sell should not be the purpose of creating.”
Her fingerprint is evident in her textile collages, mixed-media creations, acrylic paintings on canvas, and her passion for art on ceramics — which she calls “story tiling,” in reference to the tiles she loves to paint on. It shines through in her prose and poetry and in the way she engages in every community she finds herself in.
As I look at her while we wind up our conversation, I realize that her heart shines in her work — in its vibrant colors, its positive messages, and the way it portrays everyday life with all its possibilities. On top of it all, she makes it sound so easy, yet one realizes just how humble she remains despite her success. S