"Ports of Call" Artist’s Statement
Ayala Artistspace: October 2-16, 2008
 

In keeping with an ancient maritime practice, ships at sea were wont to  dock, or “call” at port cities when necessity, commerce or  inclination so dictated.  These safe harbors were, and still are, havens for the weary mariner, as well as for the woozy voyager or the furtive fugitive. As such, they are also the stuff of adventure novels, plus romantic tales of spies and swashbucklers and, of course, the doleful newsreel scenes of  the doomed Titanic casting off her gangplanks to begin her maiden voyage.

As a small child I myself pushed off from a pier at the Port of Call of Manila on the grand liner, the SS President Wilson, to the accompaniment of foghorns and brass bands which almost drowned out the sound of my mother’s weeping while I giddily threw down confetti and streamers to the crowd below. The Wilson put in at Yokohama and Honolulu en route to her final landfall at the Port of Call of San Francisco. It took a long time to get there.

But a much longer time has gone by since then and as I look back over the sixty swift years from that first coming ashore, I have come to realize that in essence, I am embarked on an ongoing voyage from one safe haven to another, and then another, and yet another, with no final destination in sight. At each place, whether it was Brazil or Barcelona, Paris or Provence, Manila or Morocco, whether the purpose was to live and learn or to replenish psychic provisions or to restore my spirits, I always had a survival strategy: my Art. Painting was always a shelter from any storm, the shore I chose to be washed up on. To further the cliché,  it is what I would bring on my desert island.

That is what this exhibit is about. It is not a complete itinerary by any means but just my way of remembering the unforgettable and preserving the degradable. It is a wanderer’s blink-of-an-eye, eclectic sight-bites from my own personal Ports of Call.

Phyllis Zaballero
Quezon City
October 2, 2008