It’s the greatest to be an artist,” claims Nestor Olarte Vinluan outspokenly, abstract painter and former dean of the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Fine arts, whose 37-year artistic career has rendered him well-known both in the local and international art scenes and whose liberal vision and sensitivity towards the field he chose and nurtured, the realm he practically grew up with has also made him one of the most sought-after and most significant contemporary artist-professors in the country.

And for Vinluan, being one, a visual artist that is, has not only given him the freedom to do what he desires but has also given him the opportunity to give back to the community and to inspire young artists who hope to be like him one of these days.

But beyond Vinluan’s innate sense of compassion and his palpably felt sincerity—traits that endear him to his students, to his peers, and to his family—is the artist’s massive body of work that is also definitely worthy of mention. His pieces are no less than evocative, meditative, and lyrical ones—all equally depicting his affinity with his environment and the cosmos.

Painting the union and the disentanglement and the harmony and the discord of the earth and the sky, Vinluan has managed to create a potent and abstract visual language all on his own—the zenith of which he has reached through embarking on an extensive and exhaustive process of trial and error, through learning and discovering, and through a continuous metamorphosis of his expression.

“Up to this point, I still draw figures, but what I’ve been exhibiting are my abstract works. I think that I do have more freedom in working with abstraction. I can do more without having to really follow a certain kind of form. Also, what enamored me in abstract is the freedom to work and to experiment in medium and in technique,” Vinluan says of his shift from figuration to abstraction.

And since Vinluan, as a young student in UP, had been exposed to the emerging abstract works of Jose Joya, H.R. Ocampo, Arturo Luz, and Fernando Zobel, it was natural for the artist to somehow be acclimatized to his predecessors’ aesthetic sense. 

Inspired by the wide spaces he has grown accustomed with in his province of Pozorrubio, Pangasinan, Vinluan’s pieces portray the interaction and intermingling of color fields and seemingly illuminated fragments of varying hues. This is the recurring theme amongst the also New York-trained artist’s opuses.

But while they embody organic spaces and rock forms in an abstract sense, it’s not always like that. Some of his works also thrive in the beauty of purely geometrical forms and patterns.

Seeing a Vinluan piece is as good as being teleported to outer space where luminous heavenly bodies and overwhelming galaxies are a plenty.

His exhibit last year at the Ayala Museum called ‘Radiance’ is the perfect embodiment of Vinluan’s modernist and mystic aesthetics. Here, drips and dots of different sizes slither all around his canvases, massive paint flow like a dyed waterfall on surfaces, and apparent are circular forms that continue to fascinate the artist up until now. All of his works in the exhibit, in fact, bear semblance to planet atmospheres and star clusters.    

Mostly large-scale, Vinluan’s ‘Radiance’ paintings reveal the artist’s laborious technique—layering of colors upon colors until the desired effects are achieved.

“I let paint flow,” Vinluan says. “I work by splattering, blotting, and dripping colors. It is controlled chance in a way. My starting point is a specific color and then move from there. Sometimes, I have seven layers on my surface. I use acrylic now because it suits me better than oil. I find that I can manipulate it easily.”

And because most of Vinluan’s artworks are done in large proportions, this requires the artist to strike his canvases laid out on the floor.

He adds, “The bigger works would make me move, make my hands and body swing.” His small works, on the other hand, entail Vinluan’s method of removing and adding paint.

How does he know then when a painting is done? “When my mind tells me that I’ve achieved the desired atmosphere I want to evoke,” Vinluan answers.

Conceptualization, for Vinluan, takes place almost everywhere and almost any time of the day.

“I get a lot of inspiration from anything that I see that’s why I hold on to my camera all the time. I photograph the things that touch and intrigue me. Sometimes, it’s scary when I get high on a certain thing or a perspective that I'm seeing that I forget the time and where I am,” he explains. “But when an inspiration comes to me, I distill the imagery and manipulate them to my liking.”

While viewers can only second-guess Vinluan’s abstract works, not knowing what they stand for, since abstract is commonly devoid of objective references, they may be comforted in the fact that Vinluan puts clues as to what his paintings represent through their titles.

To which Vinluan gives an example, “You may not actually see them [a woman in red coat, a river, and a landscape] in my work but those things are my starting points. Sometimes though, my works are untitled because they’re just purely forms.”

As father to artists Paolo and Liv and once professor to some of the most prolific artists of this generation such as Elmer Borlongan, Mark Justiniani, Emmanuel Garibay, Manuel Ocampo, and Karen Flores to name a few, Vinluan also affirms teaching as his passion.

“After my deanship of nine years, I took a sabbatical. But now, I’m back again. I think you really need to balance teaching and studio work so that one may not interfere with the other. At the same time, when I’m not teaching I miss it too,” he says. “I teach with an open mind; and my credo is to look at things freely and imaginatively.”

It seems the Vinluan has the best of both worlds. He has found his art and art has found him. And no matter how sometimes he deems art as ephemeral and fleeting, his otherworldly opuses will forever remain constant in the annals of Philippine art, which has been and is still grateful for his art and radiant spirit.