CARLA BIANCA RAVANES-HIGHAM
Ginny Guanco is a big ball of positivity. She enters a room and exudes the energy of a twenty-year-old who speaks about her passions exuberantly. She is the prime example of someone who lives life to the brim, fully investing in the things that make her happy: her work as a media relations consultant for one of the country’s top PR agencies, going to the gym, and of course, her art.
Art has always been Ginny’s first love. Her earliest memories involved drawing sessions with her older sister, “Summers were spent locked in my room and I vividly recall drawing female faces and figures in fashionable dresses for different occasions.”
Ginny says that her love for art began because of the beauty of colors, “I just loved seeing colorful objects and stuff I would experiment on my own with crayons and try to mix and match the colors. I wasn’t afraid how they would turn out to be.”
Guanco with the centerpiece of her art exhibit—the biggest one, done in acrylic on a 36×36 canvas
She boldly experimented with different colors even without concept, knowledge, and training in Color Theory and Color Harmony and this is how she excelled.
She then participated and won in art contests all throughout high school in College of the Holy Spirit in Mendiola and pursued Fine Arts at University of Sto. Tomas.
Being a child of the ‘70s, she immersed herself in the message of the era and its loud cries for peace, love, joy, and happiness reflected in her artwork. However, she had to leave art behind for a time to pursue another calling: Public Relations.
The artist’s love for everything bohemian is reflected in this artwork entitled ‘Ocean’
It took her a good 15 years to go back to her first love after she gave up PR full time, “There was this tugging within my soul as if telling me to restore the lost years. I got reconnected with my college friends thru Facebook and started going with them to attend art exhibits, that’s when the churning in my heart were awaken.”
It was the death of her cat, Simba, that ignited something inside of her to pursue the dream that laid dormant for a time.
“I grabbed some coloring pencils lying around and an old sketchpad of my son. I didn’t think of a subject or of anything, I just drew.” She then posted it on Facebook where it garnered a lot of likes. This gave her encouragement to pursue greater endeavors, all of which led to seeing the fulfillment of a childhood dream: her own art exhibit.
Her exhibit called Boho in a Solo opened on September 15 at the Galerie Y in SM Megamall and showcased 32 colorful paintings of women, 26 of which are clad in classic designs to reflect Ginny’s love for everything bohemian.
Her 26 muses are clad in similar fashion, in flowy and flowery creations and are labeled, alphabetically, after hippie names that derive inspiration from the elements. Among the collection, exhibit guests would meet Aura, Freedom, Lilac, Seagull, Meadow, and Ocean, all hand-drawn in acrylic, in a style which Ginny describes as a fusion of fashion and art illustration.
This effect is a direct result of her training as an artist both in the UST and in the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., along with fashion illustration lessons from no less than the doyenne of Slim’s Fashion and Arts School, the late Salvacion “Slim” Lim Higgins.
“I would describe my drawings as a mix of the two drawing disciplines where one features elongated figures for fashion and the other shows a more sinewy effect as in the fine arts,” she describes.
This proves that dreams do come true, no matter what the age. She ends, “There is absolutely no end to reaching one’s dream. One just needs to set a goal and be serious at it. I was really bent on restoring a career in art. It was abruptly stopped when I changed career paths. Art took a backseat for 15 years. But the flame inside my heart which had been rekindled anew is no longer just a tiny spark. It is a forest fire!”
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