Glenn Studio Art Collections

Cogon-Abaca Drawings 1982

Upon my father's suggestion to tour the Philippines in place of creating artworks having noticed that I was already a workaholic, I finally gave in and dropped my tools to go on a long journey hopping from one island to another of the few of the many islands in the Philippines. When I arrived at the mountain province up north, I could not believe to have found myself in a beautiful place named "Sagada". I fell in love with the place and its weather and spent a few months there. Not having any art materials with me to do some sketches, initially I was able to extract black charcoal from used batteries I found along the road that may have been thrown away by transistor radio users. I did a few sketches with it and any available scratch paper but finally met with another artist named, Louie Stewart, who was making his own cogon-abaca paper- - grass materials that were readily available in Sagada. The result of this meeting with Louie are these cogon-abaca drawings series which papers I even brought to Germany and Spain to continue sketching their respective landscapes.