100 Faces in 300 days, part 7: Four girls

I've switched to charcoal -- not pencil, but the sticks you break into stubs and hold between thumb and two fingers. Very nice, very tactile. Blended with a finger. 

The first drawing below this text is of Laumi, one of my best friends in high school. Reference was taken at our HS graduation in 1985. Where are you now? We are all looking for you.

Second is Melanie, one of my all-time besties. The reference photo was blurred -- I know I have more pictures of Melanie from our childhood/early adolescence, but darn it, I can't find them. I need to digitize. I didn't get the pretty bump on the bridge of her nose.  Sigh.

Third is Karen, another classmate, from her own reference, which may have been taken in 1988 or 89, from the hairstyle and clothes. The thing with charcoal is that it can resemble those made-to-order mall-art drawings, especially if the person in your reference was shot in a formal studio pose.

The girl with the bangs at the top of the page is me. Lakambini Sitoy, aka Bing. At my high school graduation, the same shot that Laumi appears in. I sleep-walked through the event, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt afterwards. You can't tell -- I look very happy, very pretty, in all the pictures. I was quite nice-looking, back in the day. Youth wasted on the young, maybe. Or just a girl struggling very hard to keep her head above water and make it look effortless, in which case I was the victor. 

I don't think these drawings are exact likenesses. They do resemble the people they are supposed to be, though. I still have a tendency to make faces slightly longer and/or narrower. As a result, Asian or Latin American faces look more European. Never mind. Draw and learn. Besides, if my face looks prettier than it actually was, I can always claim it's not a portrait of me but of imaginary Bing, my double self, though in 1985, she was not just on the way out, but already consigned to a box beneath my bed, abandoned (still trying to decide between boyfriends) as I learned to navigate the real world. 

100 Faces in 300 Days, Faces 85-88, 90.

Leilani Sitoy (April 19, 1966 - November 18, 2007)

 

My sister Leilani (April 19, 1966 - November 18, 2007).  At 20, a new B.S. Psychology graduate, she had it all figured out. Her little orange typewriter, the carefree smile, the movie star pose, the hand-lettered desk signs that read “Smoking Area” and “Silence: Writer at Work.” Her red t-shirt says “I’m an alcoholic. In case of emergency, give me a beer.” Her name in cut-out letters (hand-made as well) on the shelf behind her, and a Menudo collage by the window. Her little Post-its, her colored markers and her lighter carefully arranged before the typewriter.

The words on the large cowrie shell read “Golf Club.” These were her new barkada, her new friends; they liked to hang out at our house happily drinking. “Golf” was for “golf-golf-golf,” i.e. “gulp, gulp, gulp” which can sometimes sound like the same word in the Philippines. A few weeks before, she had taken a treasured photo album with the name of her old barkada, her group, on the front, stuffed the photos into an envelope, and replaced them with pictures of these new friends.

She left to take a master’s degree at the Ateneo de Manila the following semester. Manila – the sudden absence of community support, the different culture of that Catholic university, the urban fashions and the disquieting coexistence of extreme wealth with extreme poverty -- changed her. As these things go.

Our best and closest years were when we were young. Not young-young, but young teenagers, starting from when I was about 10 and she 13, up to when I was 15 and she 18. We had the fantasy world that I have written about previously. She had her imaginary boyfriend, and I had mine – in fact, she had tremendous influence on whom I chose to be with in there. Of course, in this alternate universe we were both exceedingly beautiful and irresistible, as were all the other girls who populated it (no female bullying, no nasty put-downs). We were not sisters, but distant cousins – I think I must have been an embarrassment for her, with my glasses and my awkwardness and my bad Cebuano. And incidentally, we were war orphans, because in a fantasy world, parents tend to complicate things.

We developed this world through stories and pictures. When people interview me about my published work and influences, they always ask, “Who is your father? What is his occupation?” Rarely, “Who are your parents? Who is your mother?” and never “Do you have any siblings?” They probably think I formed my worldview reading the Bible and Dickens at my father’s knee.

My sister never got a chance to get interviewed for her published work, because she stopped writing fiction in her junior year at college, at around the time she began to work seriously on her grades. She ultimately graduated Magna Cum Laude at Silliman University. As far as I know, up to the time of her death she never wrote fiction again, although when I was a lifestyle editor around 1997, I pestered her to write a few pieces for my page. She complied, and the work was (of course) brilliant and funny. My editor asked for more, but Lani declined; the first baby had come; she had no time. If she drew at all, it was chubby, pleasant little cartoons of her co-workers, for birthdays and such.

We fell out, actually, nearly overnight when I was 15, and really did not reconcile until a few weeks before she died, which is a weird thought, considering there are studio photographs of our grinning selves, and me and her daughters playing. But our relationship was fraught. (Come to think of it, the only boyfriend of mine she’d really approved of was “Paolo”, and he was a jointly created fantasy in the aftermath of a movie we’d seen. When I fell in love with another movie boy but wanted to string “Paolo” along, she wrote a short novel about a man-made plague that killed off the new boy AND the entire world including herself, leaving “Paolo” and my character along with two or three others, presumably with the task of repopulating the earth).

So why am I remembering this now, why am I writing this now? Especially since it is not the hagiography we are expected to write of a loved one who has died? Because I cannot find her anywhere but within my memories and a sad boxful of notebooks at the bottom of a closet. She died before Facebook, before Pinterest. When I Google her name, the only things that come up are the brief tributes I posted shortly after she left.

Lani (right) and Bing, 1996

With our mom, 1979

July 1969

1970

Tween misery

 

T. Valentino Jr, Rondeletia, Lakambini and Leilani Sitoy
(aka Bill, Pinkie, Bing and Lani)

Too good not to share.

Me with my family around the first quarter of 1982. I would have been 12 going on 13. My sister is all dressed up, probably for some end-of-the-year event for high school seniors (in the Philippines until a few years ago, these were 15 or 16 years of age).

What the hell was going through my head? Had someone yelled at me? Was I practicing my Italian war orphan stare? Was I wishing a crushie-boy would yank me by the arm and whisk me into a realm of endless summer and heavy firearms and little kisses? I was a shy and eyeglasses-wearing teen with a secret imaginative life and with no social skills to speak of, not even – and this photo proves it – in the bosom of my own family.

I was such a pathetic kid (always in the top three in my class) that, when a far more popular classmate asked me to write in her slam book, I acquiesced at once (albeit with a bit of a sneer). There were a couple of blanks labelled “Favorite Artist.” At last, I thought, a kindred spirit -- who would've known? So I wrote “Edgar Degas” and “Pierre-Auguste Renoir.” Too late I realized, leafing through the other entries and coming upon names like “Gabby Concepcion” and “Dina Bonnevie”, that “artist” was a direct translation of artista: “actor/actress.”

Less than a year before, I had stood up onstage at my grade school graduation and, before a packed auditorium, delivered a memorized speech full of grand ideas that my father had written. I was elementary school valedictorian. At the same time that I was committing that speech to memory, I was writing a loooong story, called “Raid on Rio Nova”, directly on a typewriter that was missing an “n” (a reject of my dad's). It was an adventure story filled with blood, guts and explosions featuring the boys of Hornet’s Nest and a stable of gorgeous girls loosely based on myself, my sister and some kids we had known but no longer hung out with.

A few weeks prior to this picture being taken, in a notebook I’d marked “Big Christmas Edition”, I’d written a story that was a shameless (or shameful) rip-off of Little Darlings, gender-reversed, in which the lead character, Paolo, nearly loses his virginity (on a dare) to a beautiful girl with straight black hair called Bing. They both end up weeping and saying “No! It would ruin everything!” I suppose it proves that as a sexual enchantress I met with zero success – not even in the bosom of my own imagination.

But some years after, I got contact lenses and learned to smile and to wear crop-tops and flip my hair, and above all to play wide-eyed and somewhat dumb. Things got marginally better.  😉

100 Faces in 300 days, part 6: one person (Dan Keller)

These are all drawings of Dan Keller at various ages. And I don't think I'm done yet.

I've moved from random strangers seen on holiday to people I know or have communicated with -- newer friends and those from way back. This happened after I'd drawn 59 faces and was feeling a bit more confident about my skills. I started with self-portraits and then did the picture of Dan that you see above, taken in 2011 in Hawaii and found on his website: www.dan-keller.com.

Work in progress. From a 1970 photo on his website.

Dan is the Daniel Keller of Hornet's Nest (Il Vespaio), so that could be what is at the root of my fascination with him, the fantasy boy of my sixth/seventh-grade self. But it is more nuanced than that. I will ponder. I will articulate the results of said pondering. Soon.

 Above: As Tekko in Hornet's Nest, 1970 (Il Vespaio). 

Filmed in 1969.

1972

100 Faces in 300 days, part 5: family resemblance

I thought a bit of families and family resemblance in the Easter week. These  drawings are of my sister Leilani (1966-2007), her daughters Sofia and Bea, and my stunning cousin Carolyn. The men are my husband Vagn's sons. (Faces 80, 79, 70, 82, 68 and 2 of the 100 Faces project.)

Getting a likeness is incredibly exciting (and also quite demanding). Building up someone's face through pencil strokes (tentative and experimental ones) is also an extremely intimate and personal process. It is as if one were touching a person's mouth, their teeth, their eyes -- what human beings use to see, eat, plead, stare each other down, etc.  It was actually on account of this (the feeling that I was intruding on a person's space) that I started drawing strangers: an effort to desensitize myself, not get excited, keep a cool distance from their humanity. But then it became time to find out whether I could still maintain that objectivity while drawing someone that I knew.

With the shift to subjects I knew -- or more correctly, subjects who would know that I had painted them -- the notion of accountability was there. I would have to work harder than I already did.

In drawing freehand, so to speak, without guidelines or grids, a dialogue begins between me, the artist (the viewer and capturer) and the image -- though not necessarily with the person himself. A commitment is forged in the hour or two that it takes: a pledge to be as faithful as possible to what I see, out of respect for the subject. A promise to put my ego aside (the part of me that says, "I am the artist and this is you -- deal with it!"

Sometimes the end product merely reflects the moment that I stopped erasing and redrawing, thus letting myself off the hook and declaring the picture finished.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 4: People who encouraged me

100 Faces in 300 days: People who've been supportive of both my writing and my art over the years. My former boss and the closest I had to a work mentor, journalist Inday Espina-Varona; Filipino-Canadian poet Albert B. Casuga and Danish-Filipino journalist and NGO organizer Filomenita Mongaya Hoegsholm. Faces 78, 75, 81 and 67 of the project.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 3: Self-portraits

 

Self-portraits. At least the first five. There will be more.

I used to do a lot of these — in a mirror — as a young girl, particularly after I discovered the joys of 6B pencils. One of these days, I'll find those early sketches (out of proportion, but at least drawn from life) and post them. For the moment, these: taken from photographs of me from my childhood (lots of those) and early teens (very few — why was that?). The last one, of adult me, is from a photo taken in December 2022. I dislike my adult face so much I couldn't bear to give it the same realism as the others, so, eschewing graphite, I decided on colored pencil: red and violet. Whatever happened to the big brown eyes (hidden behind glasses most of my life, but nonetheless part of my self-image)? Is it possible to ever love one's aging face?

It would be great to start painting again, with big bold strokes, but the 100 Faces project must be finished first, and it really isn't a good idea to crack out the oil paints while we have the heating on and the house remains sealed against the (late) winter. I would like to do more dramatic, more critical, more subjective self-portraits, bordering on the un-pretty if need be.