Celebration of Family

 

Essay 38. CELEBRATION OF FAMILY

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

I can believe Avic Zamora when she described herself as a 'little vandal' creating her own little masterpieces on the walls of their house. That's because all children with innate artistic talent truly are like that. No surface is safe from them if they run out of paper to draw their artworks on.

Maria Victoria Lazana Zamora was born in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan. Her father, Dominador P. Zamora is a native of Bulacan, while her mother, Carmelita, was from Manila. Avic's father studied Mechanical Engineering. Unlike Avic, her father was drawn more into poetry. Avic said her father is a "natural-born poet, with great talent in writing poetry".

Avic took up Fine Arts major in Advertising Design at the College of the Holy Spirit. After graduation, Avic worked as a Designer/Merchandiser for a clothing line that manufactures high-end apparels. She no longer works for that company. Avic is now into painting full time. She is very prolific, because, she already has under her belt eleven solo art exhibits, not to mention the two-person and group art exhibits she had joined.

Pablo Picasso is Avic's favorite painter. Avic admires him not only because of his art, but also because of his philosophy, his vision. Picasso is the most inventive artist ever, churning out styles after styles one after another. Cubism - which Picasso invented in collaboration with George Braque - was the style that captivated Avic.

True to Picasso's dictum that art and natural appearance are two different things, Avic is not averse to distorting her figures. People with conventional tastes may look askance at her works, but the sophisticated art loving public with modern tastes had been educated long enough to see modern paintings in a new light - to, in fact, see them as more suitable adornments for houses of contemporary design.

Avic is a brilliant and fearless colorist. She uses as many colors as she wants in her compositions, although she also has paintings where she used minimal coloration, like for example her carefully composed still lifes of fishes. But Avic wasn't always a colorist. She had developed years before, when she was still  in college, a style where she used only three colors - black, white, and red. Those black-white-red paintings became her signature works - her brand. Avic has been consistent all these years. Aside from being loyal to the stark color scheme she truly prefers, the distorted figures outlined in black, which originated from when she was still a student, are still the same figures she routinely paint nowadays.

This way of outlining her figures in black to make them stand out, in addition to deliberately distorting them, is what made her paintings so Picassoesque. However, her distorted figurations don't disturb in the manner that the works of another Filipino cubist, Ang Kiukok, disturb. Avic's works do the opposite. They calm, and soothe, and charm the spirit, because what she depicts in her paintings are people praying, contemplating, and giving each other group hugs. Families - Avic celebrates families in her paintings.

When the pandemic struck, there occurred a shift in Avic's leitmotif. Dread now radiates from the eyes of the masked family members scared of the viral danger that could be floating in the air. This suite of work is so timely. A social realism of the non-political kind, Avic shows in this series how fearless she is in working out of the box away from her comfort zone. This series, I believe, is only temporary, and Avic will be returning soon to the familiar familial theme, whose effects - calming, soothing, and charming - are exact and vivid description of her temperament and personality.