Text and photos by ELIZABETH LOLARGA
SOMETHING about painter Kelly Ramos’s story about her return to painting after years of suburban housewifery reminds one of the lyrics from Swing Out Sister’s hit “Breakout”: “Tomorrow looks unsure / Don’t leave your destiny to chance / What are you waiting for? / The time has come to make or break / Breakout…Don’t start to ask /And now you’ve found a way to make it last / You’ve got to find a way /Say what you want to say /And breakout.”
Her journey is similarly encapsulated in her friend Jade Snow’s poem that is included in the exhibit notes of Kelly’s solo exhibition of large-scale oil paintings, “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” which opened recently at Baguio’s Sanctuary Gallery.
A single mother and art writer like Ramos, Snow wrote, probably referring to the title work in the show, “…What’s left of a tube of paint / Once it’s spilled its guts / The colors you use / For images of meaning, hued / What’s left of kitty / Once its chosen you / To win over, spent / What’s left of a wall / Once it’s broken down / The things you use / To keep inside, freed.”
Ramos went to the University of the Philippines Diliman for fine arts studies and met her future husband there. An early marriage and the coming of their three sons threw her off balance so she put painting aside to concentrate on raising her kids, writing technical stuff uploaded on social media on the side and adjusting to life in Cagayan de Oro.
At CDO she put her organizing skills to use by helping set up the artists’ collective Red Lambago, a happy mix of visual artists, writers, theater people and youth. She described the group that lasted two years as having so much spunk to put up exhibits and performances and make a dent in the city’s cultural life.
Meanwhile, since she lived outside the city and art materials were hard to come by, she worked on bond-paper size paper, experimenting with flower and coffee stains. Around the time the strains on the marriage became hard to bear and separation was the way out, came opportunities to be part of group shows in Manila. Soon enough, she was noticed and invited to hold her first solo show last year at Finale Art File’s Upper Gallery in Makati.
By this time she had settled in Baguio where her eldest boy was enrolled in college. She said, “It’s nice to paint in Baguio. I can move the furniture in the sala and create space to paint. Or I go to a friend’s big house in La Trinidad. Then I just send my works through Victory Liner, and the gallery picks them up (at the Pasay City terminal).”
At her Finale show, she put the smaller room in the mezzanine to use, installing a closed-circuit television there to catch images of viewers looking at her works in the gallery just beside it, thus putting the concept of breaking the fourth wall into practice. (“Breaking the fourth wall” is a term in theater, literature and art to mean destroying the boundary between a work of fiction and the audience.)
One of the first works she did was “The Things We Leave Behind.” It’s an image appropriated from the photograph of a Frenchman. He scoured the countryside of France taking pictures of many abandoned expensive vintage cars that were being reclaimed by the jungle.
As she moved to the next painting, she noted how a narrative was unveiling, and it was about her creative process or “what was happening in my studio. I was able to tell a story. The paintings weren’t just separate pieces,” she said. At the same time as she finished a work, she sent pictures through email and Facebook. Snow responded by writing that Ramos seemed to be breaking the fourth wall, and that phrase became the show’s title.
Ramos never realized how she missed painting on a large scale and applying thick coats of paint (this is the impasto style) . She had been doing those stains on small-size paper too long and the biggest she managed was only 16” x 20”. In her Finale and Sanctuary exhibits, her smallest work measures two feet by three feet and the longest, three feet by six feet.
She likes painting big because “it gives more freedom. I’m able to feel the space and the consistency of the paint. With small works, your brushstrokes are also smaller.” She tells others to “open yourself to ideas to the creative life.”
The show runs until June 29. The gallery is inside the Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary on Campo Sioco Road, Baguio City.
