For the most part, Gigi is an intuitive painter, letting emotions stimulate what she paints rather than any particular visual image. She finds rhythm in alternating between abstract figurative and total abstraction. It keeps her work and process fresh, unpredictable, and exciting.
Colours and beyond is how she simply describes her work, wanting her paintings to be open to interpretation, about how the paintings make the viewer feel, how they evoke certain emotions. Titles are just for practical reasons. She invites the viewer to a different way of seeing, whatever or however that may be.
Ambiguity, paradox, what if, transcendence, endless possibilities, are the reoccurring themes in her work, often challenging what is perceived to be real. The appearance of a figure is not particularly about that figure, but always about how the whole painting affects the viewer in a particular way.
Gigi was born and raised in Manila in the Philippines. She began painting using oils in High School, where she chose Fine Arts as an elective course. She decided to continue her studies in arts at the University of the Philippines, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, majoring in Visual Communications.
As a professional artist, she worked at Fil Cartoons and Philippine Animation, initially as an assistant animator, in the days before CGI, and later moved to the background department, attracted by the use of colours and paint. She worked mainly on Walt Disney and Hannah Barbera TV productions and considers herself fortunate to have been trained by, and worked with, incredibly talented and generous artists from the US, Australia and of course the Philippines. It was as a background artist that Gigi first discovered the versatility of acrylics and never looked back.
She also uses other art materials with this medium.
While travelling, Gigi does a lot of digital art using ArtRage, an App on iPad. She loves to use ArtRage because she can still paint with it. Her digital paintings are finished products but they also inform and inspire her traditional paintings.
Gigi is married to a very talented British writer, Neil Howarth. As a creative duo, they have lived and travelled around Asia and Europe immersed in different arts and cultures. While still travelling, they have eventually made the southern part of Spain their home, where Gigi has become a naturalized Spanish citizen and a full-time painter.
