(SPOT.ph) It may have been out of the blue when we messaged Lourd de Veyra on a Monday morning to ask if we could interview him about his art—it had been a year since the writer, poet, singer, and sometime Spot blogger started @lourddoodling, an Instagram page dedicated to his, well, doodles, and he already had one exhibit under his belt, carried out online in January by Golden Cargo Gallery. His reply: “Basta hindi ko alam ginagawa ko.” Pretty sure we’re not the only ones who would disagree.
For one thing, De Veyra’s doodling is nothing like the random sketches of stick figures we used to draw in the margins of our notebooks in school. They are dark, detailed depictions of things most of us would relegate to the back of our subconscious in hopes they’d never reveal themselves in nightmares: rats, demented clowns, and other grotesque creatures all come together to evoke a sense of dread—the kind from which you can’t look away. As Dali demonstrated, art isn’t just meant to be pretty.
As the story goes, it was all born out of a difficult year. “I was having a difficult time writing; to play and listen to music was impossible,” De Veyra wrote in a Facebook post in January to announce his first exhibit. “It was to cope with an extraordinarily grotesque time. June last year I decided to go back to a childhood love—drawing [...] Nothing structured, almost nothing planned, and it was fucking therapeutic.”
When asked how he’d describe his style, De Veyra says, “I have no idea. ‘Amateur, inebriated doodling?’ I dare not call it ‘drawing’ because that would be a huge disservice to the genre.” Whatever he chooses to call it, there’s an evolution that’s already evident in his work, if you look at his Instagram feed from beginning to end. Early posts had fewer lines, less intricate detail, and the most recent ones show he’s been experimenting with painting. Learning to paint, it turns out, is a conscious effort, but he wouldn’t yet deviate from his favorite medium: “Ink, black and red. Why my favorite? Because that's all I know. It's not like I've got options. But I'm slowly and painfully trying to learn acrylic painting. I'm constantly pestering my friends MM Yu, Louie Cordero, and Nona Garcia.” The other local artists he credits with inspiring him is a varied bunch: “Santi Bose, Manuel Ocampo, Jojo Legaspi, Alfredo Esquillo, Peewee Roldan, Louie Cordero, Nona Garcia, MM Yu, Poklong Anading, Roxlee, Doktor Karayom, Kawayan De Guia, Emong Borlongan, Kaloy Olavides, Vic Balanon, and the best of them all, Richard Gomez.”
Wherever this newfound means of expression takes him, it wouldn’t be farfetched to say De Veyra will kick ass at it in his own way—the way he’s done with most other things he’s chosen to add to his multi-hyphenate credentials. His surreal imaginarium of otherwordly characters will certainly live in our minds for a good, long while.
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Source: Spot PH
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