Photo by PINGGOT ZULUETA

No one can deny the thoughtful potency of blooms and the rush that they bring, say, for blushing women who receive them either on momentous occasions or on crappy days. Designed by God, the master architect, they are the perfect pick-me-upper, a grand gesture, and a reminder that beauty still exists in our world amidst man’s tendency to counter and raze it.

And geniuses agree. Wordsmith William Wordsworth once said that a flower is a poet’s darling. Master of haiku Matsuo Basho opined “the temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.” Walt Whitman admitted that a morning glory at his window excites him more than the metaphysics of books. Ralph Waldo Emerson confidently contended that flowers are a “proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.” And of course, let’s not forget that the world’s greatest artists sought splendor and inspiration from them, too. Painters such as Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe are some of them.

In the country, numerous flora and fauna painters exist but it seems that only a few stands out from the rest. One such artist is Mona Santos, wife of abstract artist Soler.  Known for her close-up and life-like renditions of blooms, Mona seemingly captures the very essence of these primordial favorites with such ease and grace. But really, what Mona does is hard work because after all, stunning artworks are born through the most vexing means.

With the aid of her little paintbrushes, Mona painstakingly paints every fleshy fold of a flower or of a leaf with the utmost attention to detail, making her spend a lot of time on a certain piece. As a result, Mona’s opuses look like elaborate photographic images of blooms that may not be seen as oils on canvases when viewed from afar. The artist also says that she enjoys painting the minutiae of each flower, each petal, and each stem and how light hits the flowers at a specific angle, creating a shadow or a pattern that is eye-catching.

And although flowers may well be a painfully recurring subject of painterly pursuits, Mona is not one to be pigeonholed into a single formulaic expression. Mona, it seems, makes sure that she doesn’t bore her audiences by producing a suite of diverse works all the time. Instead she causes them to wistfully drown in her multihued and very feminine sphere of flowers, letting them experience a visceral rush, a natural high.

Boasting of vivid color and features, each of her pieces is different from the last and yet come out the same insofar as artistry and thoroughness is concerned. But despite the artist’s tendency to yield controlled and faultless brushstrokes on her canvases, Mona has the knack to maintain the meditative quality of all her works just as she masterfully breathes in each one a distinct sentiment.

Her monochromatic peonies, for one, convey a decadent and dramatic sensuality while her green anthurium opus suggests the freshness of spring and summer. Eliciting a mood of tranquility and   immaculate beauty is her large work of a bouquet of white blooms with hints of green. This work particularly reminds this author of the perfect bunch of flowers a bride might want to hold while walking down the aisle. Meanwhile, her fiery blooms in orange, red, and yellow tones evoke a lover’s passion to his or her beloved. “Every flower is not the same so I try to get all the details in. Amazed ako sa creativity ni God,” she says.

“Why flowers?” one would probably ask. To which Mona jokingly replies, “Kasi hindi na ako nabibigyan ng bulaklak.”   On a serious note though, Mona says that she took impetus from O’Keeffe’s iconic flowers done in varying tonal transitions and James Rosenquist’s big pieces. Rosenquist’s approach on his subjects prompted Mona to create massive, overblown pieces of her own. While other painters choose to depict vast fields or rows upon rows of flowers, the artist’s technique involves closing in on the most interesting parts of, say, a flower arrangement and “cropping them into vignettes” or snippets.

But surprisingly, Mona is not an academe-trained artist. As a kid, she was just a hobbyist who loved to draw and doodle. “Mahilig na akong mag-drawing bata pa lang. I also took lessons from Galo Ocampo in high school. Kapag may project sa school or magde-decorate ng kwarto, ako ang laging nauutusan dun. Uto-uto kasi,” she laughingly recalls. “In college, I knew that I wanted to take up fine arts at the University of the Philippines. I got in and went ahead with painting but I shifted to advertising. I transferred because many were saying na walang pera sa pagpipinta at halos lahat ng mga kaibigan ko nasa advertising.”

Mona admits that her background on the arts stood on sandy ground, that is, until that one fateful day when she audaciously picked up a brush and struck a blank canvas lying around in her husband’s studio. “Maraming oras noon na nagbabantay lang ako ng gallery, tapos wala namang masyadong pumupuntang tao. So I’d frequent the studio just upstairs our gallery,” she remembers. “Eh laging may canvas, laging may paint, laging may brush kaya sinubukan kong magpinta.”

With a revitalized passion for painting, Mona knew that there was no turning back. She started joining several group shows at first and was eventually invited by Finale Art File to mount a solo exhibit in 1993. “Siguro if I didn’t end up with Soler’s family, baka nasa advertising pa rin ako hanggang ngayon,” she confesses. “Kasi ang unang encourager mo si Malang tapos si Soler. Mahiya ka naman kung hindi ka pa magpinta eh lahat na ng gamit andyan na sa’yo, so it was also really easy for me to get into painting.”

Now a formidable name in the local art circuit, Mona is nothing but grateful for the extraordinary opportunity that art has provided her with — a more observant eye that recognizes beauty from everyday things. “For me, art doesn’t have to be deep,” she reveals. “Minsan art na ‘yung may nakita kang driftwood na may unusual shape or art na ‘yung graffiti on walls. You can draw naman inspiration from everywhere eh. With art, I’ve learned to be appreciative of things that I see.”

Like her husband Soler, Mona sees art-making to be part of her life for years to come or “until my eyes and my hands give up.” She adds, “Pinagdarasal nga namin na sana hindi mangyari ‘yun kasi ayaw naming matigil…kasi ang sarap!” And hopefully, God grants her wish because we all need flowers from Mona and their crisp, romantic, and opulent visual whiffs that pique the heart.