It is perhaps expected that someone who grew up in an environment rife with art, surrounded by artists, will turn out to be an artist himself and create art. Paulo Sunggay is one such person. His youth coincided with the active years of the Baguio Arts Guild. At that time, art exhibits and events happened often and he attended most of them. He was regularly in the company of artists, some of them older, whose views in life and expression he was exposed to. Truly, artists can’t be apart from their milieu, not apart from history around them.
“But it’s something that boils down to the personal,” Paulo asserts.
He adds, “Even if you’re surrounded by works of art, even if you grew up with artists, what you’ll turn out to be still depends on something within you, something which is a part of you that you cannot deny or disregard.”
Paulo Sunggay’s life course led him to finish a degree in Industrial Engineering. Somewhere in the backstreets of this city he manages and owns Katipunan Restaurant, your not-so-usual kainan which also doubles as a your not-so-usual gallery, hosting mostly group shows of Baguio artists. But boiling down to the personal, the part of him that he can’t deny or disregard produced his first exhibit in Tam-awan Village in 1998.
It is this same part that churned out artworks that are on exhibit now. This time, he finds that he’s more confident with his art and his creative process. His previous hesitations have diminished, if not eliminated.
“The process of creating makes you strong. You feel a different energy,” he explains.
He does silkscreen/serigraph, a medium he plays with, exploring the pockets of creativity in instruments used for mass production. He is challenged in making an artwork feel organic even if creating it involves means that standardizes designs and patterns.
“If you look at the finished artwork, it can’t explain everything. You have to see the process,” he further explains. His own process, he describes, is intuitive. When he starts, he doesn’t have the whole picture. It is part of the process that he questions along the way, until the artwork becomes complete.
As an observation, he adds, “I find it amazing that if you produce a piece of art and it is liked, no one can tell if you were depressed or in pain while making it, even if you were.” That, of course, is still something personal.
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