Diokno Pasilan's Still life
Motif
Image courtesy of the artist
Some of Diokno Pasilan's memories originate from his encounters of living in the Philippines and Australia, both countries are islands, one a lot bigger than the other but nonetheless sailing boats, ships and small water craft have played a large part within their histories for survival.
The above still life by Pasilan looks playful, almost like someone is having fun by stacking the boats up to see what they might look like as a shape, the audience who gaze upon it may liken it to ships out of water, it appears at this point the artist's human curiosity starts to kick in for where does the motif start, which boat is subtracted or added to the motif's form and how does he articulate this within studio praxis.
Why does memory perform such strange tasks of arranging what might be considered an odd array of different coloured boats and why does Pasilan draw in charcoal, eliminating the colour, reducing the number of boat shapes to an almost skeletal form, like a fish back bone without a head or tail.
Image courtesy of the artist
One doesn't think artists can have all the answers of their artworks, for somethings artist's create contain a certain mystery in the way they manifest themselves, from human remembrances into a drawing. And all the text in the world isn't going to adequately explain why Pasilan has created such an image but it now floats on the Internet for the audiences engage with their memories of ships sailing through the passages of time, oscillating down ones nervous system colliding with other remembrances through human delay.
One of the nice traits of Pasilan's drawing the audience is free to engage as he has created craft (charcoal drawing) to set themselves free to travel their own oceans of memory. And in a way the drawing above by Pasilan in its engagement with the spectator reminds me of a statement by the American Artist Dan Graham "my art is for the people" and so is Doiknos it seems.
