A review of the 15th Solo Exhibition of Ms. Camille Jean Verdelaire D. de la Rosa, entitled Moods and Moments at the Renaissance Gallery, The Art Walk, 4/F Bldg. A, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City. Opened on August 22, the show will run up to the 31st of this month.

The last time I had a look at Camille de la Rosa’s works was five years ago. And it was all gardens, landscapes. Nothing was moving but the clouds, the flowers being blown by the soft summer wind or the dancing shadows of the trees that were captured so vividly that you seemed to be looking at photographs instead of paintings. In her 15th solo exhibition in the Renaissance Gallery in SM Megamall, which opened last Aug. 22, De la Rosa, 25, has gone one step further. She has now proved to the world that she is a well-rounded artist, mastering not only the command of the brush but the craft of capturing every subject that she desires to paint.

BY NOEL SALES BARCELONA
CULTURE
Bulatlat.com
Vol. VIII, No. 29, August 24-30, 2008

MANDALUYONG CITY—The last time I had a look at Camille de la Rosa’s works was five years ago. And it was all gardens, landscapes. Nothing was moving but the clouds, the flowers being blowing by the soft summer wind or the dancing shadows of the trees that were captured so vividly that you seemed to be looking at photographs instead of paintings.

In her 15th solo exhibition in the Renaissance Gallery in SM Megamall, which opened last Aug. 22, De la Rosa, 25, has gone one step further. She has now proved to the world that she is a well-rounded artist, mastering not only the command of the brush but the craft of capturing every subject that she desires to paint.

An evolution, not only a departure

It is futile, I might say, to compare the young De la Rosa to her father Ibarra, though the reference might be helpful.

At first, one may say that it is the blood that runs through the veins of this beautiful, young artist, who used to grace our television screens with her wacky yet adorable skit roles in the afternoon comedy show Ang TV during the 1990s, that made her a superb artist.

But this author believes that it was exposure to different forms and styles of painting of the Great Impressionist Masters such as Monet, as well as the local greats, which influenced her and developed her as master of her craft as a painter, particularly an impressionist one.

Gazing at the 22 pieces of works hanging on the walls of the 30 x 30 meter-gallery on that mall in Mandaluyong, the city where she also spent her childhood (she lives in one of the oldest streets in Mandaluyong City, J.P. Rizal), was a great surprise.

She has evolved by leaps as a painter. Now she is not only a painter of sceneries but a painter of human figures, especially of young children at play by the sea, gathering colorful pebbles, sand, shells, starfishes and even dreams that the sea brings to the shore, which is considered as the earthly universe.

“As an artist, it is not only gardens, sceneries that I must know [how to] paint but even human figures. Because painting human figures can give me a greater area to explore,” she explained in Filipino, when asked why she shifted from painting gardens to humans.

An extension of her childhood, completing her wholeness

According to the artist herself, the children in the canvases are actually extensions of her childhood… For she never really enjoyed being a child (“Hindi ako masyadong nakapaglaro” [I didn’t play that much when I was a child], she says. And whenever she finds the time to look at children at play, she would gather every moment in her hands and enjoy every drop of it, like the water in the beaches she had visited during her painting stints—Boracay, Lucena, Batanes, Batangas, Marinduque, and even unknown beaches in the country.

Her love of the beach and the sea, explains why she used the sea, the elements thereof and the different moods that each waves can create as a background for her works.

But let this author clarify that it is not only children who are in the center stage but the not-so-young, too—an old woman picking up shells or shellfishes being washed to the shore by the waves, the fisherman docking at the bay, and fathers and mothers cuddling, carrying their children at the sea.

Symbols of unfathomable human emotions

You can see on the paintings the preciseness of the painter in capturing the mood of its subjects, like we have said before, fresh and raw – be it negative (jealousy, alienation) or positive (joyfulness, lovingness).

But what are more interesting in Camille’s works are the symbolisms that you can draw from the figures pictured in each work.

Is it the children’s dreams that you can picture in the work entitled “Sail On,” or is it just like that—three children who are amazed by a sailboat floating from afar?

The simplicity of life or the hardness of it, you can picture in the “Old Woman and the Sea?”

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