ART ATTACK

(FROM THE EDITOR'S, SENSE&STYLE'S "ART-ISH," JULY 2008, senseandstyle.net.ph)

In my editor’s letter for a travel magazine back in 2005, I wrote that life, more than simply its inspiration, was the essence of all art. This is also the bedrock of this special, collectible edition in your hands, whose aim is to help open your eyes to life as an art form, which, to borrow from that same letter, is “often overlooked because it is neither framed nor gilded nor hung on a museum wall.”

Randomness is hard to achieve. Organization merges back, if you don’t pay attention. —Charlotte Gainsbourg as Stephanie, The Science of Sleep, 2006

Putting these pages together, I find it truly inspiring that there is so much art around us, whether or not we care to distinguish a world of difference between a B-brush and a Filbert. Sure, it would have been grand if we all had the wherewithal to go for a piece of divine genius at Sotheby’s, but more often than not, all it takes is to live our lives with our eyes wide open or—in the case of Stephane, Gael Garcia Bernal’s character in Michel Gondry’s dream of a movie, The Science of Sleep—with our “eyes wide shut,” with apologies to Stanley Kubrik.

To Bernal, who played “white-collar drudge by day, genius by night” in this hip, heartfelt love story, The Science of Sleep is a film about rejection, but to me, it is as cleverly and delightfully hopeful as its wonderland version of Paris abuzz with cotton clouds, paper boats, cardboard cars, and cellophane waves, not to mention skyscrapers and trains made entirely of toilet paper rolls.

In the magazine world, where reality and fantasy necessarily collide almost every day of the workweek, movies like Gondry’s quirky, quixotic, and inventive masterpiece are a wellspring of inspiration. But so is reality. In preparation for this issue designed to acquaint us with the art that surrounds us, I sent my writing stable of twentysomethings out there in search of content. They came back with more than a generous helping of artful lives, from graphic designer Chicho Suarez (“Art & Schisms,” page129) to poet, songstress, and lyricist Aia de Leon of Imago (“The Music and the Message,” page128), from book author and sommelier Ines Cabarrus (“Vin de Siecle,” page 131) to painter Camille Ver (“When All Is Still and I Can Dream,” page 133), from thespian Cathy Azanza (“It’s Showtime!” page 132) to indie filmmaker Sigrid Bernardo (“The Suspension of Disbelief,” page130). What a blessing, indeed, to have such amazing talents inhabit our everyday world!

For Sense&Style associate editor Hector Reyes, whose main duty as fashion and beauty editor compels him to step up as a creative director as well, generating ideas for the more visual aspects of this magazine, this month’s issue is a welcome challenge. He and his team of pretty young things, many of them artists waiting to unfurl their wings, have spent the past few months in close collaboration with photographers, makeup artists, hairstylists, and fashion designers, such as Cary Santiago, Oskar Peralta, Danilo Franco, and Francis Libiran. In pursuit of Hector’s vision to give not only fashion but also hair and makeup their rightful place in the realm of art, these venerable designers created for this issue the most beautiful black gowns, most of which, paired with the makeup artistry of ArtDeco’s RB Chanco (“Behind Beauty,” page 65), I find as hauntingly shadowy as Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow or, better yet, as his design inspiration, Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio. Why, like fashion, like most pieces of art, makeup and hairstyle also seek to turn mundane into magical.

Another such collaboration was with EveryWhereWeShoot, with whom we sought to bridge the gap between photography and lomography (“Digitales/Lomostories,” page 78), not that we saw any real difference between the two disciplines, except perhaps in terms of general appearance and technicalities that are beyond us. It’s quite refreshing to work with these young photographers, who wear their artistic credentials and creative potential on their sleeves or, in the case of Garovs Garrovillo, from her waist down in the form of a pair of checkered Jodhpurs that disappear into special-edition Adidas.

For this month’s cover, featuring Miss Earth 2004 Priscilla Meirelles with young actors Rafael Rosell, Brent Javier, Marco Alcaraz, and Jay-R (“Body and Broadway,” page 119), we have a double dose of art appreciation, celebrating the human body, a divine creation that has all the elements of balance and harmony, and cloaking it in little touches borrowed from our favorite larger-than-life tales on the theater stage.

Indeed, despite the protestations of the purist, art finds expression in many forms, which now include even practicalities, such as clothing, what with so many of our couture and prêt-a-porter masters drawing inspiration from or working closely with painters, sculptors, filmmakers, poets, and architects. Maybe art, like life, is also about moments, fleeting as they are. Maybe the Mondrian dress that the late Yves Saint Laurent—for whom we have a tribute this month (“Au Revoir, M. Saint-Laurent,” page 104)—created using wool jersey in color blocks of white, red, blue, black, and yellow was only meant for a particular season sometime in the mid-Sixties, but as we know now it has had its pride of place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Speaking of New York, our senior writer Krizette Chu, who is in Manhattan at the moment, dispatches a report (“Superman Wears Moschino,” page 58) on her coverage of “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” an exhibition ongoing until September at the Costume Institute at the Met. In this report, at the risk of displeasing the purist yet again, she might have found the core of true art, which, like the marriage of fashion and superheroes in this exhibition, allows us, to paraphrase its curators, to fantasize and escape “the bland, the ordinary, and the quotidian.”

And so, in the quest of palatable, everyday art, may I also invite the purist to a gourmet tour of Paris (“Wish Upon A Michelin Star,” page 35) because, like a Picasso or Swan Lake or a passage from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor or a 150-word Proustian sentence or The Marriage of Figaro, a good meal, whether or not fanciful, requires fine skill and produces a sense that all is beautiful in this world, too.

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com.