My camera can't do justice to these paintings done by Mark Lewis Lim Higgins which are currently on exhibition at the Ayala Museum.
I didn't know he was a painter, but it easy to glimpse how running a fashion school has influenced even his art.
The title of the exhibit is Gold in our Veins and I think it wants to dispel the fact that our countrymen were just a bunch of monkeys on a tree before the Spanish came and supposedly 'discovered' us.
We HAD a thriving culture before them white people came and enslaved us.
And you can see it in how skillfully we used gold in our jewelry, in our fashion, in our daily items.
It shows a very sophisticated group of Filipinos who traded well with many of our Asian neighbors like the Chinese and the Arabs and the other Malays.
Higgins' paintings though veer more towards the Chinese look because of the prolific trading, commerce and social contacts we had with them.
I like his work! It's like a costume designer deciding to paint portraits of pre-European Chinese who came to our shores.
The looks he created can easily be an award-winning portfolio for a movie like The Last Emperor. It's like meeting the court of a dowager Empress.
It's like each portrait can be a character in the scheming courts of royalty.
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