Something swirls in the remotest garden of her soul

The first time you encounter her, Rorie Aradanas smothers you with an overwhelming diffidence.

She only thaws and warms up after several bottles of beer, prawns cooked in wine and first-person narratives of the charmed life as an only daughter, a beauty queen and a career man’s wife.

As she describes her long affair with painting and her equally long marriage, scattering around a potpourri a quotable jokes, you sense something more elemental: a disquiet that grows on and resonates in you.

“I have to paint or else matiriring ako!” Rorie says, self- deprecatingly, trying hard to sound sober. You don’t blink or shrug a shoulder. Certainly, she is not the first or the last woman you encounter in Mindanao or elsewhere who would tell you in different ways the reason for this gift not of her choosing.

By her front porch is stretched and still blank canvas the color of Boracay sand, ready to be filled with daubs of colors, Rorie’s brave brushstrokes.

“ When the orchids were blooming, I had no ready canvas. Now that the canvas is ready, the flowers are not blooming,” she explains.

The many rooms of her family house, just outside the gates of the Pasonanca Park, are inhabited by her prodigious works.

Many became gifts to a few friends she keeps. “Mostly weird types, like me,” she adds. She had also sold several works to tourists.

O’Keefe-ish
Earlier, at Willy Arcena Recuerdos Gallery in downtown Zamboanga City, her works lorded over some walls-dendrobiums and African tulips, Georgia O’Keefe-ish for their giant petals aping a woman intimate parts, though Rorie says she barely knows O’Keefe in her own works at all.

She had been convinced that it is best for her to keep painting flowere. “ Willy says flowers become me as a woman. Paintings of flowers are also easy to sell at gallery,” she says.

Willy is the master critic and cultural powerbroker here. Rorie reveals she owes so much to him. In his company her art budded and bloomed.

She is the only woman founding member of the Art Association of Zamboanga, of which Willy has been long-time President and has one of its few mainstays for the past decade.

But in her house’s loft, in what used to be her spacious studio (now her adolescent daughter’s aerie), there are works that are subversive to Willy’s ideal Rorie painting, works that are redolent of rage, thriving images from Gothic rather than Victorian garden.

Visual docus
Her is a visual documentary of her various bewilderments and disenchantments. Among them are “Tres Marias”, three worn-out faces she wears through phases of grief, beyond the mask of composure and competence.

The next day, she takes you to a friend’s office to take a look at “Nude”, the figure of a woman, most probably a self portrait, provocateur whose dark brown chocolatey skin is rendered in the peculiar textures of petals.

“Painting keeps me away from alcohol. I have to be clear minded in order to paint well,” she confesses.

In the next breath, she adds, she drinks rhum gin as she closely observes the flowers at her friend’s garden just before she paints them.

Painting keeps Rorie’s soul as it does other women’s; keeps her in touch with that remote and protean part of her secret worlds even as she acclaims her rootedness in what is practical and real.

“But you know, more than being an artist, I have a moral obligation to take care of my family,” she beams.
( The writer acknowledges a travel subsidy from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts’ Visual Art Committee which allowed her to encounter the women artists of the Zamboanga Peninsula, together with art critic Flaudette May Datuin in 1997.)