Lenore RS Lim: The Seduction of Prints
New York based printmaker Lenore RS Lim can hardly believe that she has come a long way in the art scene and has gone way beyond her initial and very simple dream (almost laughable to some in this day and age) of becoming a housewife who will just fully tend to the home, her husband, and her kids. But Lenore’s artistic journey was not an easy one, to say the least.
A woman for others, Lenore has dedicated a generous part of her life in service to her family, to her friends, to the community, and to the church. Having a good-natured natured heart and an effulgent spirit, Lenore constantly sees to it that her loved ones are well taken care of and are receiving all the best things life can possibly offer. Art-making was the least of her priorities then and was something she couldn’t afford doing. Lenore’s story proves, however, that when you truly love something, you can always make time for it.
Lenore was already 44 when she decided to take a shot at the arts. Before she rose to become one of the most prominent printmakers in the country, though, Lenore had spent her time teaching art to children right after she graduated from the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts in 1967, and building a family of her own. It was not until she and her family migrated to New York in 1988 that she had formally practiced making art. Thinking that it was time for her to do something for herself and seeing that her two kids who had gone to college at the time won’t need as much guidance as before, Lenore purposely rediscovered her love for the arts.
In order to revisit her first passion and gain new insight about art, Lenore attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she took up printmaking and computer art from 1990 to 1995. Lenore’s effort to study again paid tremendously. And her works and the techniques used in making them can really attest to that. Here is a woman in her 40s, creating vivid prints and evocative art pieces using the most recent and most advanced printmaking and computer techniques as if she had been doing them all her life!
“When I decided to become a printmaker, I wrote my goals. I’ve always written my goals in life on a yellow legal paper, but that time, I made my list tighter. I told myself that I’d have solo shows every two years and in between I’ll join group shows. That’s what I did, and fortunately, I was able to achieve them,” the soft-spoken Lenore says.
What makes Lenore unique from other artists is her undeviating fixation with printmaking. Whereas other tend to just dabble with it and eventually return to watercolors, oils, acrylics, and sculptures, Lenore has committed her time exhausting the many possibilities of the genre and trying out the many combinations of conscientious printmaking techniques in her repertoire.
“I love printmaking. I stuck with it maybe because when I started doing prints, I had a full-time job. I wasn’t depending on the sale of my prints. I was solely doing them for art’s sake. If I sell, that’s just a bonus. If I don’t, then it’s all right. Just the appreciation of my husband and kids is good enough. For me, printmaking is not work because I love doing it,” she reveals.
As an illustrious and accomplished printmaker, Lenore is known for her highly stylized and cutting-edge techniques in intaglio, relief, lithography, and serigraphy as well as for her interest and continuous exploration of aesthetics and design in the realms of carbonundrum, collotype, monotype, solar etching, photo-etching, xerography, digital manipulation, inkjet enlargements, and chine collé and giclee works.
A testament to Lenore’s never-ending artistic growth can be seen at the main gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Bulwagang Juan Luna. A collection of almost 70 small and big works, the 20-year retrospective boasts of key pieces from the different stages of the artist’s life. The exhibit is a reflection of Lenore’s life and the celebration and joy she feels for it. Her works embody nature and nostalgia—things that touch and are greatly appreciated by the feminine psyche. Hers are pieces that showcase a certain impression of quiet rumbling, profundity, femininity, and delicate beauty seen in the poetries of everyday life. Immediately, through her works, one can see how Lenore effortlessly manages to bring about remembrances of the past and reminiscences of nature in her prints and in great irony, translate them using avant-garde print processes.
Divided into seven parts, the exhibit starts off with “Ethereal Vision” that features thoughtful prints of grasses, leaves, weed, and fiber. The second part, called “Nature and Nostalgia” showcases etchings and monoprints of the Philippine baro’t saya overlapping with bits and pieces of derelict things from nature. “Ode to My Motherland,” the third part of the retrospective, is a tribute to the refined and fragile details of native laces, while the fourth part, dubbed “Layer upon Layer,” is a collection of pieces inspired by natural motifs.
The latter part of the exhibit, on the other hand, represents Lenore’s relentless experimentation on new printmaking techniques as well as in digital media. “Constant Evolution” shows collotypes while “New Formats/Expanding Horizons” displays large-scale versions of the artist’s earlier work on baro’t saya, veils, panuelos, and nature prints executed in giclee on canvas and rendered in eye-popping colors of blue, red, orange, to name a few. The last part of the exhibit, meanwhile, billed “Metamorphosis,” is a pure deviation from the artist’s previous pieces color- and style-wise. Here, Lenore has utilized high contrast hues of blue and black and white in her central forms, which are very suggestive of ancient Chinese and gestural brushwork.
Suffice it to say that Lenore’s works take pride in their long history of constant change. They also thrive on poetic melancholy and musings of the artist’s heart coupled with Lenore’s progressive techniques. Her works exemplify a synthesis of the past and the present.
“The most significant moment for me when I make art is seeing my work after it passes the press. There’s a natural high accompanying the pulling of the work. It’s like birth,” Lenore emphatically says. And the artist is truly blessed, for she seems to have a wellspring of ideas and things that inspire her, as if, in Franz Kafka’s words, “the world [has] freely offered itself to [her] to be unmasked, [because] it has no choice, it’s as if the world has rolled in ecstasy at her feet.”
‘Full Circle’ by Lenore RS Lim is on view at the Main Gallery of the Bulwagang Juan Luna at the Cultural Center of the Philippines until April 24. - Article courtesy of Manila Bulletin
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