An Artist’s Artist

Blame it on my ageing memory, but there’s a term that escapes me x on the tip of my forked tongue I just can’t put my locked up finger on. It’s a term for artists who use ‘the old ways’ to *conserve* them so they don’t die out. (I understand conservationist is ™d by the Planeteers and that museum types just hate it when you misuse the word.)

I’m talking about the folks today (as in 2026) who are still painting portraits glaze by glaze with stand oil or weaving T’nalak ~ or artists like Jandy A Carvajal, who I first fell in love professionally with for his borlas de pastillas (AKA pabalat, or pastillas wrappers cut out of Japanese paper which is what I tried to depict in the piece above (can’t blame a girl fer tryin ^^; )
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What Jandy is most known for ​

~ is being one of the country’s last bastions of repoussé ~ and believe me, if I’d crushed on his pabalat work before, his innovative metalwork series made me fall hard (like a blind roofer (as M. Harley so adroitly put it ^^).

I was most fortunate to have been able to catch the opening of his latest show featuring his unique brand of repoussé last Monday (as I write this). It was called Material Explorations and featured 54 jewel-like images of the Blessed Virgin Mary rendered ever so delicately in recycled metals and other materials like matchboxes and egg cartons.

Even if I hadn’t spent a significant part of my life around the statues and carrozas at church, I still would have so totally been mind-blown by the sheer intricacy and detail of each piece.

Going through the show feels like going through a jewellery box ~ you’re just mesmerised by each piece, admiring how precise and clean his lines are (doesn’t take a machine to do clean work) (just sayin’). I overheard someone at the opening saying how there was no room for error; if Jandy made a mistake, he’d have to start over. 
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What I love most about Jandy

~ is how he’s an ‘artist’s artist” ~ he really does it for the art’s sake, and he really cares about the craft. And personally, I just love how I know I can talk to him about stuff like that; there aren’t a whole lot of people (let alone artists) I can talk to about this. (Or about He-Man and She-Ra and Lynda Carter ~ but I digress ^^)

And I think it’s just so great, and so fitting that he’s an educator guiding the next generations of artists that way.

I love how he sees beauty in even the smallest things. (I remember Saoirse Ronan said this about Van Gogh in Loving Vincent ^^) I love how he saves ice cream cups and Starbucks sleeves and how he would’ve saved the glass bottles the iced tea came in at the opening so he could put flowers in them. 

I also love how, in spite of his formidable track record, there is not a single diva bone in his body. He was so adorable when he did the obligatory interviews ^^ He told me afterwards how he just wasn’t cut out for on-cam stuff like that.

He’s definitely paid his dues for this show

I know this for a fact, all the way back to the part where you nail your concept down and put your proposal together. I also know for a fact that it’s no joke when you juggle art with your job as an art professor at one of the country’s leading universities (at one of its most beautiful campuses). 

He’s also cut himself while working on this show, and when he showed me his poor Band-Aided finger and told me how long it took to stop bleeding, my heart really went out to just how much work he put into it. We chuckled a bit over how making art really is *risking life and limb* ~ injuries just come with the territory.

I may have mentioned this on the jillablog before, but I remember at that artist’s workshop I attended when I was just starting out that they asked, ‘Who is the real artist? The one who can talk a big game? The schmooze masters at the openings? Or the ones who really buckle down in the studio and do the bloody work?’ (Okay they didn’t say it quite like that, but you know what I mean ^^)

Cut finger and camera shyness aside, I know for sure that Jandy’s had his nose to the grindstone, from collecting and processing his materials to moulding every single dot, petal, and detail in each piece.
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My friend and colleague

I gotta tell ya how *starstruck* I was when Jandy introduced me at his opening as his colleague. It super reminded me of Jeremy Brett’s legendary Holmesian introduction, ‘My friend and colleague, Dr Watson.’ (I should be so lucky!)

I was asked at the show how I knew Jandy and it occurred to me I’d known this guy for like what. 20 years? More? Through Ang INK, of course ~ and it was at an Ang INK show last November that we’d run into each other again after a while ^^ This is his work at that show (I’m just loving the mermaids ^^)

And of course we fell to talking about stuff and I can’t help remarking on how lucky I am to be able to talk to him because I know he understands about things like the long hours, the late nights… It just makes that much of a difference talking to someone you know has been there, too.
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The world needs more artists like him

~ not just for the reasons I’ve mentioned but also because of his generosity. He has zero sense of ‘I’ll keep the goods to myself to get a leg up on the *competition*.’

It’s all thanks to him I’ve got the show I’m working on now, and he has helped me 1000 per cent with my applications and given me all the leads and advice that he could. I also gotta tell ya, in my experience, not a whole lotta artists will do that. Sadly, not everybody believes in the ‘sharing economy’ and ‘there’s room for all of us at the table’ in the art world.

But if I had to give just one reason why we need more Jandy’s in the world, it’s because he’s doing so much to preserve a lot of what is most precious and arguably more endangered than a northern white rhino. And I don’t just mean the repoussé or the pastillas wrappers, either, although we absolutely need to save those techniques, too. 

I mean, at a time when there have to be First Saturday Devotions, we need more truly devotional, truly beautiful art featuring the Blessed Virgin Mary. She, for sure, deserves the most gorgeous metalwork man can produce, especially in these dark days, and Jandy is just the artist to create it. 

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to publish this post (if at all ^^) but if you’re reading this and you can spare the time, do go and check out Material Explorations at Gallery B of the NCCA Gallery in Intramuros, Manila which runs until 30th September. Be sure to take your time over each piece, and don’t miss his live demonstration and workshop that’ll let you try your hand at repoussé.

Learn more about Jandy at jandycarvajal.com  or check him out on Facebook or Instagram.