“I just really want to produce great works of art,” exclaims Cristina Sollesta-Taniguchi, also known as Kitty.
We sit conversing on the patio of her residence-gallery in this city. She would utter a grand wishful thought in one breath and radiate a refreshing earthiness in another. One is drawn to her commitment to express through the arts her many passions—passions rooted in a fusion of influences that she tirelessly engages in: her earlier fascination for architecture, interior design and “beautiful things,” her childhood years in Siquijor and its wealth of rites and iconography, her love for literature honed under the tutelage of the Tiempos, philosophical and existential ponderings about modernity, and the inescapable complexity that is womanhood.
Kitty, now in her 50s, nestles in a labyrinth of hard-earned wisdoms.
All these perhaps lend themselves to a certain quality so mystifying of the women who emerge in Kitty’s artworks.
Not a few have come to notice and feel attracted to Kitty’s renderings of women’s faces and bodies. The artist believes that every woman is beautiful. She wants you not only to look at, but to converse with, her women. Hence, the women in her paintings exude a certain depth of character. They are centered, thinking, feeling, connecting to a deeper sense of intellectuality and spirituality.
In Eve’s Cousin (reproduced in cover photo), Kitty reveals a woman staring at herself in front of a mirror just before going to a party, draping a piece of cloth around her, cogitating about her personal choices. The work is an “examination of the physical of the beautiful.” It is, according to Kitty, “about looking in and out of the axis of being a woman.”
She says: “The expression as a woman comes natural to me. My works portray and mark periods in my life. When I was in my 30s, I questioned womanhood and dealt with motherhood; I questioned my career as an artist and the personal turmoils in relationships. I felt the need to evaluate symbols I used. Having lived as a child in Siquijor, I assimilated symbols of mysticism, the engkanto, and the manghuhula in my works, the neo-pagan becoming a kind of spiritual anchor. But these were all realms that I dared interrogate and played with in my imagination.”
This was Kitty’s personal landscape when she produced her Tattoo and Tarot Series in the ‘90s. On handmade paper, and experimenting with watercolor and oil, the series revealed bodies painted with symbols of women’s life experiences, pains, intellectuality, and spirituality.
Earlier on in the late ‘80s, she produced the Paper City Series, black and white paintings of her impressions of the big cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, and Singapore, spaces where she felt suffocated and repressed. “Living in these concrete jungles, I felt like a miniscule [speck of] dust in the city, so insignificant,” she recalls. “I wanted to domesticate the city.”
Yearning to be unbounded by stereotypes and fixed categories, Kitty is able to slither away from any trap, including her own self. Reacting to the seriousness of her work with the Paper City Series, she simultaneously worked on Heroes & Dancers, known as her red paintings. The series explores images of androgyny, dance, and speed in her aesthetics. Kitty regards it as more playful, tending toward the whimsical but sprinkled with social comments.
After introducing her terra-cotta sculptures through an installation art exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Kitty has her hands full working on a new terra-cotta series called In Search of the Crow. “Black birds, such as the crow, are often used as symbols of omen, of evil. I want to use the image in a more metaphorical sense, relating to human existence. I want to reclaim the meaning of the crow to signify deeper knowledge and healing.”
A self-taught artist, Kitty embodies poetry and philosophy, working them into her artist’s hands. Her daughter Mariyah is making waves in the art scene as well.
In Kitty’s definition of a great work of art, “that which could not be ignored and will not be forgotten through generations,” only time can tell how her works will figure. But already, Kitty has successfully established herself as an artist who can bequeath to us a distinctive brand of aesthetic greatness.
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