California weather can be exhilarating in the summer. It is perfect for painters who see the intense sunshine as a blessing if one paints light.
Burlingame Train StationPulgas Temple, Redwood CityCentral Park, San MateoCoyote Hills, Fremont
Outdoor lighting brings another kind of energy to a painter. It is almost intoxicating. This July, we had a break from our watercolor Thursdays with Matt Crayne. Ann Malouf gathered watercolorists to paint for three consecutive Thursdays while we were on hiatus from regular classes.
The sun was shining in full force, illuminating the trees, foliage and people who were in the parks and places of interest where our watercolor group went.
Armed with pens, brushes and watercolors, on three consecutive Thursdays, we met at the Japanese garden in San Mateo Central Park, Pulgas Water Temple in Redwood City and The Burlingame train station. All of them were places of interest in the Peninsula area.
There were about four participants at a time, we relished the time together and the sunlight that bathed us!
I dragged my big bag of art supplies to these locations and enjoyed every bit of the painting experience. We were all outside with fellow painters in the pursuit of capturing images of the same subject! I kept everything in my large LL Bean Tote bag, brushes, water jug, tall water receptacle, three types of watercolors, Shmincke, Sennelier and my new Japanese watercolor set. I took both my Chinese brushes and Windsor Newton sables.
My inspiration for the paintings was the light. There was something about its intensity that I was very mindful of the values of light and dark that I was seeing. I knew that my regular watercolor palette would need those contrasting values.
I had a great time and being outside made painting truly effortless.
What does it mean to be an artist in the age of artificial intelligence?
I am an illustrator first, and then a painter second. To me, the image on your paper, canvas or wall is the essential element of your art. The “image” is contained in your imagination.
Image making needs to be fed, from one’s state of mind, one’s environment, friends, enemies, plants, food, desserts, losses,loved ones, thoughts, feelings, dreams but most importantly God. He is the original intelligence where all creation comes from.
If one looks at this image below it is of great interest to me where God is situated. He is in the firmament that is shaped like a brain. Michaelangelo’s depiction speaks volumes.
Barely touching Adam, He reaches out to His best creation, Man in His image. He bestows Adam general intelligence that is a copy of His own. (Genesis 1:27). The brain is thought to be the seat of all intellect.
In this new age of AI, the new synthetic models of intelligence morphs into something bigger than human brain power. Could it be bigger that it surpasses God’s intelligence? How many models are there?
I ask questions because I am a “marker” of events, an artist of sorts, trying to leave an imprint of imaginative creations that my own intelligence affords. Will the use of AI to improve my vision hurt mine?
Enhanced by AI
This picture below is the original version of lotus in lily pond. I submitted it to ChatGpt and true to form, it was improved, enhanced and became a new version.
Lotus in a Lily Pond
Which version did you like? I sold this painting for a tidy sum. I could not believe its newfound potential. Artificial intelligence enhances original craft.
It’s 2026 and this is the culmination of my eternal youth. I’m now a septuagenarian.
I thought I was going to ride 70 miles to mark the passage of those years, but it rained all day on my birthday. So I had to pivot and mark this milestone by assembling 70 of my watercolor and mixed media art.
I have been very keen at curating and keeping my watercolors in many places in my home, under the bed, inside closet space that is beginning to show overburden, under desks and even on my glass windows.
So here’s the start of a gallery space to share my watercolor and mixed pursuits.
Poster for Art show
My watercolor class at the Beresford Recreation and Senior Center has been on going to close to 14 years now. There is a community of fellow watercolorists who enjoy the thrill of painting.
Our teacher is illustrator Matt Crane and he diligently gives instruction and feedback to fellow painters who need help on an as needed basis. Workshop style, we paint whatever strikes our fancy.
Some ladies come for socializing and we talk endlessly between 9:30 am to noon.
Sumi-e adaptation of Mary Cassat’s mother bathing her baby
I am a passionate painter of still life, landscapes and flowers. Run out of things to paint is not my problem, I like everything.
My watercolor voice started from painting flowers and green plants. You can see some of my earlier work on my Pinterest https://pin.it/4fsQMOMRx Because of this early saving of my paintings on 5×7 Strathmore cards, I am now googleable. Just type Candy Bandong watercolor and I show up with my work!
Painting has been a childhood passion and I seem to have never forgotten it. My early forays in drawing and imaginative use of materials to make art was inspired by a happy exposure to art materials bought by my grandfather. My father would also sit me down on his desk and let me use his fountain pens and Chinese brush.
He introduced me to calligraphy, both the Italic hand and some brush strokes created by black ink. If I can now remember with gratitude and joyful recollection, I had lots of crayons (52 colors) and palette of peelable colored pencils, plenty of Oslo paper and regular typing paper to draw on.
I don’t recall being idle as a child. There was always something to use your time with, be it reading, listening to soap operas on the radio, and making pictures through cut and paste, writing short essays, documenting all artistic creations.
Framed!
My mother was a musician. She was my inspiration to music making that I would liken painting with. It was senses engaged mostly, sometimes I could hear paintings and see music!
My exhibit seeks to be one where I have used sustainable frames, mostly repurposing old ones from thrift stores, paints and brushes I have accumulated were from friends and old artists who have given up painting.
Enjoy my sharing, my collection is one that will hopefully leave room for friendship, community and gratitude to all.
I was hard pressed to remember who recruited me to be a sorority girl. My memory is now fading, but it must have been Gisela Padilla-Concepcion who was my classmate in English 1 and 2. Her sister Gina was very active in the sorority. I was a Psych major and was barely a sophomore when I joined the BR. It was in 1973. My boyfriend was a fratman with Upsilon Sigma Phi. He was getting involved with groups that were taking him away from our “exclusive” partnership. I wasn’t jealous of his brods, but I decided that I needed to expand my radius of action and friendships. Meeting new girlfriends was the way to expand my college experience.
I remember very vividly going to Daisy Urbano’s house for our final initiation. It was in a beautiful home by the Congessional Road subdivision near Proj. 8 in Quezon City. We had to memorize a list of names of founding members and a preamble to the constitution of our sorority. The senior sisters were very strict about how we were inclusive of all types of recruits, all types of religious beliefs were welcome.
During our college days when we became members, we were holding weekly formal meetings and casual ones in the “hang out” space we carved at the third pavillion ladies’ room at Palma Hall.
These meetings also became more formal when we would reserve a conference room at a QC bake shop, Merced cake shop.
Looking back, we sponsored a movie premiere showing of “Virgin Springs” starring Max Von Sydow at Greenhills Theater, an ice cream social sponsored by Magnolia Ice Cream factory, Christmas caroling at Golden Acres Home for the Aged and Children’s Reception and Study Center in QC. We also joined a university wide Christmas caroling contest where we bagged a consolation prize. We were “benevolents” then, our efforts at fundraising benefitted chosen recipients.
We also embarked on field trips and week long out of town destinations particularly to Baler, Quezon and Baguio. We also took day trips by boat to Manila fisheries. Our sisterhood, during our very young adult lives was rife with adventures together.
In my third year of college, I left for the US to be a foreign exchange student. I left the sorority to learn about a new culture and become an ambassador of Philippine ways to Roseburg, Oregon. I missed my sorority sisters. A year later, I came back. I corresponded with Chit Balon-Inis and we shared our thoughts about sorority life.
After college graduation, we lost track of our sisters for a good 40 years. Somehow, life happened to each of us, we had careers, immigration stories, marriage, children and other events that kept us very busy.
Since we have reunited in 2022 through the collaboration efforts of Luchie Nepomuceno-Child, Fides Cordero-Tan , Chit Balon-Inis, we tracked our long lost sisters and have had many mini reunions in the US and in Manila! Finding each other was a blessing to all of us!
I’m waiting at the cardiology waiting area for my husband to finish his echocardiogram. He has been diagnosed with a heart condition that will necessitate a triple bypass. The waiting is very trying. We have known the severity of his condition for a very long time. A CABG is a pretty serious undertaking.
At Kaiser Permanente RWC waiting for Butch’s echocardiogram appointment
Many friends say it is a regular procedure for folks who are aging. But it is a possible widow maker. Buying another 15-20 years is its promise, but it will be a realistically arduous climb to recovery and good health.
I pray that my husband gets the appropriate and timely intervention he needs for this procedure. I hope we both have the strength of mind and body but most specially the spirit to overcome our heart trouble.
I started my journey September 23-November 7 2024. I flew to Nagoya via Incheon, Seoul from San Francisco. I was going to see Japan for the first time.
Sumi-e painting was my dream. As a child, I would sit with my father who had introduced me to calligraphy. It was not Chinese calligraphy but the Italic Hand. Our goal was to write legibly and to honor the written word. As a fourth grader, my handwriting was pretty impeccable.
I knew how Chinese brushes with their pointed tips were held by calligraphy masters. But not knowing the characters or the language prevented me from pursuing brush art.
I held Osmiroid and Rapidograph pens instead, and I had learned Bookhand, The Roman serifs and the Italic hand. This was long before the fonts were available through computer graphics in 1966.
My father was my first mentor in the pursuit of training the artistic eye and hand.
With two lessons that I booked through the internet, I got to meet my sensei, Ikoku Abo. She was a bright 58 year old young looking woman dressed in a traditional kimono, she spoke English with some hesitation. She tried to communicate through actual demonstrations of sumi-e traditional painting. She also introduced me to her other students and made collaborative learning possible.
Newest work, Dec. 15, 2024 Chrysanthemum with Arthur (left), weeds and Mt. Fujiyama (right)
Sensei Abo’s classes were designed as introductory classes on a Japanese art form that emanated from India, 600 years before common era. It spread to China and flourished in Japan. My first class had two other students writing calligraphic letters in formally delineated fashion. They were producing words.
The class was in a traditional Japanese heritage site called Tosanzo, in the district of Showa, Nagoya, nestled in a park called Hatchuhiso. I drew the balcony area that overlooked the Japanese garden.
Tosanzo heritage house
My watercolor background is one where I learned perspective and the use of transparent paints, with the idea that one creates layers, from light colors to dark tints. Japanese sumi-e was monochromatic! There are no layers, mainly fast brush strokes!
It was painting with one and done lines! The tips of the Chinese brush did all the work! The brush strokes though quick, was purposeful. Almost unrecognizable as having been done by my hand, the pictures I drew were not abstract but efforts to draw nature. Lotus leaves, birds, flowers were the go to subjects. Sensei Abo said it was done preferably without getting one’s ego involved.
The four gentlemen of sumi-e were the chrysanthemum, plum, bamboo and spring orchid. They are probably the signs of the changes between seasons, late summer and fall, winter and spring. I learned calligraphic strokes on how these still life subjects were made. Like strokes in creating Italics, Bookhand, Uncials and Batarde, there are numbered lines to create a particular tradition in oriental calligraphy and painting.
The four gentlemen of sumi-e that I learned from my immersion to Japanese culture are those in the circles drawn. Zen is its practice, where one loses one’s ego and makes one start as always a beginner. We are to paint in the moment, relishing the here and now.
The pictures and execution of words are one. I would almost have to learn Kanji, Katakana or Hiragana to do proper sumi-e paintings.
My first foray was how to use the inkstone, the seutuki and the ritual of liquifying the block of ink (made from soot of oil lamps). A seutuki was a small water vessel to introduce several drops into the inkstone. Those tiny art objects are symbolic of the transition from the physical to the ephemeral. One has to rub the ink block on an inkstone that will create the puddles from where one dips the Chinese brushes. One does this with purpose and deliberateness, the hand movements are slow and really a quieting of the mind. Somehow it was a call to almost a prayer. One would have to awaken other senses, particularly that of smelling the unique fragrance of the very dark ink.
Writing my name in KatakanaSumi-e painting made by an 81 year old master, he only expressed interest in drawing chickens in his father’s farm and business. His work was found in a temple where he stayed after their farm burned down.
I have been forever changed. I gained a new insight on what painting is about. It is about finding one’s place in the world among friends in this world of odds and ends. It is doing what you love with people you love. It is living your dream.
Ricky was a classmate from elementary school, high school and we went to the same University of the Philippines College of Arts and Sciences. We were friends since 1962.
Today, he delivered an informative talk about the historical Spanish built churches in the Philippines. He spoke about the folk art and exhaustive research he has done over the 40 years he has been an anthropologist, historian and art resource for all Catholic and other Christian ecumenical religious architecture in the Philippines.
Ricky had recently retired from being chief archivist and curator of the University of Santo Tomas museum in Manila.
Most notable brick and stone church in Tumauini, Isabela
For an hour and a half, his audience of parishioners of Mater Dolorosa Catholic church in South San Francisco were rapt in awe and serious attention at every morsel of information Ricky had to say. He divided his talk with accompanying slides into three sections.
1) Church Buildings and their decorations
Tumauini, Isabela (Wikimedia photo) is Ricky’s favoritePaoay, Ilocos Norte (Google photo)
2) Sacred vessels and related objects
Photos are from the internet, but were seen in Ricky’s slide presentation
Revolving tabernacle at San Francisco, CA Mission Dolores, made by artisans from the Philippines
3) Religious Images
From the 17th through to the 19th century ivories were evidently worked in the Philippines by Chinese sculptors who had emigrated; Manila was a sea voyage of some eight days from the Chinese coast.
Abounding with about a hundred vivid photographs of iconic architecturally stunning major and minor basilicas of 500 years of Christian colonization from Spain, we were enthralled and enlightened about the rich cultural heritage of our native homeland. Factually and with some splices of humor, Ricky had documented his difficult travels from Fogo islands, Taiwan, Cebu, Western Visayas to Mindanao provinces and even Indonesia to trace and look at Filipino vestigial church artifacts. Some churches were in remote areas and were not easily accessible to travelers.
He spoke of of chasubles, ciboriums, tabernacle art, candelabras, church vestments, ivory images of the crucified Christ, Marian images, infant Jesus icons, bells and the myriad of folk art conceived and propagated throughout Christendom in that part of Southeast Asia. Many images of Christ, vestments and tabernacles have been found as far as the US, Seville, Madrid. If there are citations in books, archival material, magazines, library files of anything recorded about Philippine churches, Ricky is on its trail.
There are no other more comprehensive scholarly and specifically art inclined advocates for church art than Ricky. But here he says, he is not one to promote the art. I have heard him say in previous lectures that in looking at these living spaces where people still continue to worship and pray, “one must not gild the lily.” Art restoration has been common place in the churches all over our fair islands.
Some art restorations have been wanting in restraint or quality of the image renderings.
In this day and age where young priests are eager to preserve and take care of our rich cultural heritage of architecturally stunning places of worship, one wonders how long we can hang on to our traditional ways to pray without destroying precious artifacts in churches? How long we can keep track of our rich historical legacy of art for prayer when stone churches are painted over, large statues of saints are desecrated and sold to collectors trading in antiques and vintage art. Large scale reconstruction of churches are giving way to restoration either by ignoring guidelines of the National Historical Commission and or just unmindful of our need to preserve our very precious places of worship. Most of them predate many Catholic foreign missions and religious institutions around the world.
Candy Bandong, Ricky and Marie Crane at the Tanforan Internment Camp Memorial, SSF
Ricky mentioned his favorite baptismal font in Leyte, where in spite of the destruction of the islands due to Typhoon Yolanda ( Haian), people were able to rebuild the font with shells and indigenous materials found in the area. The Philippines being a hotbed of typhoons, natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, natural catastrophies, churches are likely victims of destruction and even just atrophy from foul weather.
Our native ingenuity to use found materials like coral, shells, stones and adobe are very evident in ways churches have been rebuilt and preserved.
I have since loved Philippine churches and because of Ricky’s efforts, have appreciated the rich legacy of faith and devotion of Filipinos at the homeland and around the world.
Regalado Jose, JrButch Bandong, Ricky Jose and Marie Crayne at Mater Dolorosa Church in South San Francisco
Ricky has authored several books and articles about Philippine churches as well as the history of linguistic origins of our Filipino dialects based on where the evidence of written and spoken words find commonality along the Pacific islands. His most recent book is the illustrated Simbahan. (Go to church is its literal translation.)
Available at Amazon.com
P.S. I will be able to append a pdf file of his slide presentation. Please wait for it.
I started playing the piano for our church here in Foster City on October 4, 2021. I played Prayer of St. Francis for the communion hymn. It has been a year now that I provide the processional, the Alleluia, a short snippet of “Blessed be God” and a recessional during our 30 minute mass.
I’m starting to train and encourage other piano players to take my place now. So far, there are two pianists who have taken my place when I’m not around, Al Santos and Lucy Chua. These two pianists like to play piano too. They also go to daily mass at 8:30 am.
It just dawned on me that there are many things involved in playing the piano, hence the need to practice everyday. The above graphic doesn’t involve the ears which is the primary sense that is engaged during piano playing.
I am grateful I can hear music and can play to share my interpretation of music. I offer it for God’s greater glory. I’m able to hear the messages of love, hope and salvation and that is a great gift to share.
Creative and Imaginative Finds 