Rellie Liwag with Robert Cenedella of Art Students League

Since the time of her foray into art, via her first successful solo exhibit, “Faces, Bodies, & Places,” Rellie Liwag has pursued art with her characteristic, all-consuming passion.  The artist has without doubt mastered the multi-faceted roles in balancing life and art, truly a most demanding taskmaster.

A graduate of Bachelor of Arts major in Communication Arts from Maryknoll College (now Miriam), she was blessed with both requisite good looks, bone structure and élan to become a ramp model for fashion designers Jose “Pitoy” Moreno, newly anointed National Artist, and Auggie Cordero.  Here, she met and married Mel Liwag, a graduate of De La Salle University and a bank executive.  The couple, in time, moved to the United States and settled in Los Angeles for 18 years. They have two children, Mike and Michelle, now both college graduates.

Rellie Liwag had a five-year stint as visual aids specialist in the Graphics Department of McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles, and later worked as administrative assistant for regional director of HR Sheraton, also in the regional office in L.A.  The lure to return home and renew ties with brethren ultimately proved irresistible.

With husband and children, she packed her things, bade America goodbye, and relocated to her homeland, a move not without difficulties in the beginning.  Her passion for art, which was sidetracked in her pursuit of life’s more essential tasks, led to mentoring sessions with veteran artists Andi Cubi and Gig de Pio.  Expanding her artistic horizon, she decided to take up art lessons under famed Japanese calligraphy master Harumichi Sakata.  Later that year, she left for New York to study at the Art Students League under Bob Cenedella, a learning experience that virtually opened more opportunities for her, as he graciously offered his Filipina ward private lessons in his studio in Tribeca.

The artist, ever determined to upgrade her skills, left for New York to study once again at the Art Students League, and, while abroad, attended the convention organized by the Portrait Society of America, of which she is presently a member.  She managed to attend, albeit briefly, classes at the National Academy of Fine Arts in New York City.  Her life, since then, has become a beehive of sketching sessions, bonding with artists, and finalizing plans for her second show, which will be mounted at the Philippine Center Building in New York, in April 2010.  Constantly aware of the challenges in holding a show abroad, she has to contend with the multifarious requirements of finishing at least a dozen new works, which she will show to the international crowd.

The show, as envisioned, is an elaboration of the thematic concern of the artist’s quest for the natural beauty of her homeland, as well as identity and feminist concerns in the ever-expanding global arena, thus entitling her show “The Land of My Birth.”  Liwag is, of course, no strangers to the pursuit of identity and gender issues.  A Pampango by her maternal and paternal roots, she grew up and was raised in Manila (by her father, the late Augusto Luciano, a revered judge, and caring mother, Teresita Panlilio) before moving to the United States.  But her choice of subject and theme encompasses the roots of a lived-in milieu – people, places and the sites, as it were, in the land of her birth – and, needless to say, the inherent it offers the artist, which have sadly fallen prey to neglect and apathy.  Even among artists working today, she laments the mad rush to wallow in the spectacle of sheer debasement and despair, humanity gone to pot.  But not this artist, who chooses to take the cudgels for the primacy of beauty as she sees it even in the most ordinary state.

Liwag knows whereof she works as artist.  Armed with a deep-seated religious faith, she is a devout Catholic who practices in art what she preaches in life.  Indeed, she has painted a number of religious subjects, but one truly memorable oeuvre is among her favorites – the baptism of Jesus Christ in Jordan River.  She was, at one time, commissioned to paint the subject by Msgr. Domingo Erfe, parish priest of St. Paul Parish Church, where she is a lector, located in Timog, Quezon City.  It was a challenge she took upon herself, firmly believing that she could paint the subject of Jesus Christ by the River Jordan, she could anything.  She graciously donated the mural now hanging at the Baptistry of the church.  So inspired was the artist that she worked tirelessly and finished it on time and was rewarded with encouraging words she received from churchgoers.

Liwag is, to many of her followers, better known as portraitist, having chosen to paint the faces of human subjects with such uncanny verisimilitude.  A work she treasures most is that of her mother, looking both regal and serene , just two years short of her centenary anniversary this year.  She has, as expected, by now expanded her repertoire of images including the unexplored aspects of familiar sites, all in her trademark style.  An invitation from Tagaytay Highlands has produced a portrait of Ara the Parrot in the Animal Farm, complete with the bird’s brio.  Ditto her rendering of Boracay’s sea-swept spectacle, and those in more rustic surroundings she has visited I the North.  These images have continually inspired her to explore the terrain and its people.  In fact, in  her effort to get herself truly immersed in the artistic process, she decided to rent a studio in Tagaytay where the view and the weather are admittedly conducive to painting.

The artist, at this stage of her career, nearing the final phase of creation, has always sought to find the beauty and majesty of things even if these images strike the ordinary mortal as being mundane or uneventful to the ordinary mortal.  Perpetually armed with paint and brush, and propelled by her abiding faith in the beauty of God’s creation, she will no doubt achieve what she has set out for herself.