In Singapore, taking a leap of faith while having drinks

Whenever people ask me how I finally made the leap into becoming a full-time artist at 49, I like to start the story with “I was having drinks with some friends one night last year…”

It was in a cava bar in Singapore’s cobblestoned Duxton Hill, a particularly atmospheric corner of food and drink establishments strewn with fairy lights. It was the kind of night that had everyone at our table, fueled by good vibes and a copious amount of alcohol, brimming with wild ideas and incredible plans of the sort that take ages to see the light of day, if at all. Though it had been a lifelong dream to exhibit my work, I said a few things to that effect with tongue firmly in cheek, not really expecting anything to come of it.

Painting has always been a source of joy for me; I knew from a very young age that I wanted to paint for a living. I was 10 when I gave voice to this desire in a declaration with the conviction only a child has. I might have been painting in the garden of my grandparents’ Manila home – my childhood album is arrayed with many such photos – and feeling a kind of high. “I want to be an artist,” I vaguely recall telling my mom, completely unprompted, to which she replied, “And you’ll be a great one.”

What she didn’t say was quite how long it would take me to get started, and it’s to her everlasting credit that she’d allowed me to traverse that distance myself. It took 40 years and a long, meandering way to get here – but there were signs of intention all throughout. I studied fine arts as a university student, although I then pursued a career in advertising that would span over a decade. In my spare time, and as a way of tempering the pressures of a frenetic work cycle, I painted.

In my mid-30s I moved to Singapore, which was a significant life change, and over the course of another decade made several other big decisions. I married, I finally left advertising, I became a teacher to young children. All these moves were given much deliberation, aided by hours of small creative pursuits to calm myself: reading, craft-making and, above all, painting.

That night in Duxton Hill, someone had said, “You should have a show!” to which I had chirpily replied, “Let’s do it!” I should have known that moment was the culmination of a perfect storm of factors that had been brewing ever so slowly over the course of my life. Several others aided the process — a shift in careers, the encouragement of friends and my mom giving me one final push.

It wasn’t a surprise that I got to painting the next day — I had been doing so my whole life, after all, as a way of riding out whatever made me anxious or excited. The work, which would become the first piece of the collection, depicted a small bird with dark, watchful eyes and intriguing plumage. It was a new subject for me and involved techniques I had not yet discovered. It was a large canvas, 3ft by 4ft, that I took a few days to complete. It was as though I’d been in a trance. It was only when I snapped out of it that I felt truly able to make the show happen.

As an early childhood educator working with five-year-olds, part of my duty is to report to parents if their child has met the milestones (holding a pencil with a tripod grip, sharing toys with friends, feeding themselves) that are expected of their age. I thought about myself, pushing 50, wondering if I have achieved the “milestones expected” of my age. It hit me that it isn’t that life is too short — it’s that I haven’t been living it, nor working to attain my childhood dreams. My teaching kids was not a coincidence. I took this first step, thus, with a willingness to accept an outcome I could not predict.

The exhibit was not the end goal, nor the childhood dream realized but rather the beginning of my journey. I still have no idea where it will take me. The only thing I’m sure of is to trust the process and have faith that it will lead me to fulfill the promise I made to myself as a child.