By Arnel Mirasol
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| Hunting My Faceless Reflection, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 3 X 4 feet |
Moments of doubt recur with disturbing frequency among artists, especially so among serious painters who don't look at their art making as mere money-making ventures. Being practical is not always a serious painter's strongest suit. Although the impulse to create never ceases, there are times when artists pause to ponder whether the things they are doing are worth their while. It is during those moments that artists conduct a thorough search for their own true selves. They are faceless at this point. They are not yet unmasked. The urge to veer off in another more practical direction surges strongly here. The artists dissect their faces with minute precision to seek there the marks that would indicate whether they are truly built to suffer and afterwards triumph for their art. The spirit of a true artist triumphs sometimes. But many fall along the way and leave serious art making to spend their energies in more lucrative enterprises. The face that can be discerned in the painting is the finished artwork, the creation. The paint drips and splatters, and the intricate patterning are the veils that mask the artist's face and render it faceless. Nacianceno's art is painting at its most serious. He had cast the die, in a manner of speaking, minutely analyzed his face that was previously masked by doubts, and saw it as the visage of a true artists willing to suffer, and perhaps triumph thereafter, for his art.
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