Abstract art is curious: it comes in studies, in experimentations on form, or perhaps in a sheer flight of pure feeling. In the realm of Philippine abstract art, Jose Joya was particularly renowned for his landscapes that encapsulate a totality of feeling, while the non-figurative abstractions of Federico Aguilar Alcuaz were noted for their lyrical patterns imbued with a natural musical sensibility. The works of these two artists reify the curiosity of the expressive abstract: how intent and accident must come together gracefully to produce such pure qualities of feeling akin to music.
In Gabby Prado’s I’m Dying but I Want Bumblebee, this lesson on abstraction comes to the fore in a particular manner: that there must be a fall in order to take flight. What Prado seems to abstract visually is a garden, but more significantly, it is the feeling of it — rendered on canvas as spontaneous gestures in airy pastel and bold hues of floral and verdant life. The lightness of her lines and brushwork involves a particular letting go of sorts akin to a fall, resulting in a series of intents and accidents that come together in a playful dance of strokes and color, as whimsical as the flight patterns of a bumblebee.
In a series of four paintings entitled It’s Pink, candylike hues, pencil hatchings, and abridged lines in black pastel are set against sunlit white and a pink horizon. With an almost childlike quality to the erratic flight of strokes that twirl and scatter themselves, each piece seems to indulge in its own playful innocence, a respite of sorts from the pull of gravity beyond its own tiny world of flight and fancy.
Meanwhile, Black Sunflower is a diptych of contrasts. It teems vividly with sunlit washes of color in one panel, but is then depicted as a somber sense of life in the second panel. Viewed side by side, the diptych may be taken as a narrative of ups and downs, of lights and darks, or even of fluctuating moods. This narrative in Black Sunflower seems to reveal something about the complex experience of emotion. Although the two paintings are clearly distinct from each other — employing a visual contrast juxtaposing vibrant hues with muted hues, both pieces are taken as one: a yin and yang of sorts that completes each other. The emotion Prado expresses here is thus brought into wholeness as such: in light, there is dark, and in dark, there must be light.
We see an adjacent visual contrast employed in two other similarly themed paintings, The Garden Bumblebee and Bum Bumblebee. While the formerfills majority of the space with nocturnal hues of dark blue and gray, the latter awakens with its vibrant wash of grasshopper green and overlaying wash of textured blue that gives the illusion of leaf veins. Among the scattered gestures of pastel and acrylic, what also stands out in these two paintings are the peach fuzz of strokes in spray paint, accenting each piece with a softness that is turbulent at the same time. The result is a quaint scatter of erratic impressions seemingly taken from a blur of images mid-flight.
In My Flower and Your Flower, Prado synthesizes her juxtapositions of light and dark, and of melancholy and fancy. Behind large washes of blue, peeks of sunset orange, morning light, and pink horizons emerge alongside spontaneous accentual strokes in pastel and paint. A silver lining is thus suggested here as more than one hue of an ever-changing sky. As gestural works of abstraction, My Flower and Your Flower are not so much concerned about suggesting a definite image. Instead, they indulge themselves in the act of becoming, of ever changing or ever blooming — as suggested by the dynamic flight patterns of the brush. The silver lining in her works thus becomes a shared hope of blooming — the same sense of hope or fancy that yearns to reach out towards a seemingly impossible sky of change.
Ultimately, I’m Dying but I Want Bumblebee is a fancifully scattered symphony of hope. Rhythm here is broken and put together as impressions in becoming, always tinged with a wishful yearning for light and life. It is a trademark of Prado’s approach to abstraction — the breaking of pattern as necessary to bring out the musicality of each piece, enabling the flight of pure feeling. In this particular series of works, the artist’s abstraction doubles as a flight of the imagination as she manages to evoke impressions of a garden that is ever blossoming, even in melancholy. Each piece is a visual flight accentuated by a lightness of feeling from the scatter of color washes and meandering lines that evoke a playful sense of life.
In I’m Dying but I Want Bumblebee, Prado imagines hope as a flight of fancy only made possible by letting go. In other words, for hope to take flight, one must fall.
I’m Dying but I Want Bumblebee runs until April 30, 2024 at Cartellino Gallery and Creative Space.
Pie Tiausas (he/they) is a nonbinary illustrator and MA Art Theory & Criticism student at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Pie loves anime, psychological horror, and pop punk.
Images taken by the writer.