Sammy's Halal - A poem by Daniel Darwin (of the NYU campus series)

A brief pang
and then
the symphonic eruption.

Moist assurances.

The doldrums
if you will
of Eastern desire.

Cafetasia - A poem by Daniel Darwin (of the NYU campus series)

A man once told me
beef
takes twenty four hours to  pass
through your system.


Bastard.

Irreconcilable Differences - A Poem by Daniel Darwin

Oh, poo.

Keep your dignity

if only your dignity

in tact.

You can not stay here tonight.

Doris

This is a painting I did a couple years ago of one of the dearest people in my life and on the earth. Doris practically raised my brothers and I alongside my mom. In the Philippines everyone - but Everyone! - has a maid. Even maids have maids. Doris has been in our family longer than I have, and I love her like nobody's business. I painted her smiling that smile of hers, so full of wisdom and joy, and spotlit her engagement ring.

Doris was engaged when she was in her mid-twenties to her first love in a tiny fishing village in Bicol Province. He died of a heart attack a couple of weeks before their marriage date, leaving her with his unborn child. She still keeps the ring on and has never remarried. When I gutsied up to ask her about it once, she just smiled and said, "I'm waiting for my marriage in heaven, Daniel." Words cheapen that kind of love. Hopefully a painting achieves it better.

It's my only wipeout I've ever done, I found this beautiful color in oils and slung it all over a gesso'd board, then did the painting with thinner, a rag, my fingernails, and a q-tip.

Colon Blow - A poem by Daniel Darwin

Sometimes I sit down

and think that I am peeing.

Suddenly it dawns on me much

like Paul's epiphany en route to Damascus

that I am not.

Silly liquid poo.

Benjamin Franklin - A poem by Daniel Darwin

Learning to poo

with Rudolf Nureyev's 700 page biography perched with precision on your thighs

makes a man healthy

wealthy and wise.

Cigarettes and Coffee - A poem by Daniel Darwin

First wave of nausea

hits like a punt

to the [w]hole

of my butt.

Cate Blanchett

is not in this movie.

Heart of Darkness - A poem by Daniel Darwin

Legs spread wide

to avoid the smear

of shame.

Puma - like leap

into the shower

of redemption.

It was my turn to buy toilet paper again, wasn't it?

Chipotle - A poem by Daniel Darwin

Sometimes my poo

like Muhammed Ali

floats like a butterfly

stings like a bee.

More Than the Sum

This was done for the library at my school. It was my attempt at trying to paint the way a good book makes us feel. The image I kept coming back to was wrapping your naked body up in a warm towel after you've stepped out of a shower, and you just feel so fucking new, you know? Like you've been re-written and all the better for it, and nothing can get past your awesomely warm towel. Or something like that. Just that warmth and knowingness that comes from having the greatest conversation you've ever had from someone long gone whom you've never met.

Becky is one of my dearest friends, and has the kind of smile you can't really gauge, which is exactly what I wanted. I just read "I and Thou" by Martin Buber, and he writes about looking into the eyes of a housecat... how you have no idea what they're thinking but you know that they are taking all of you - even the parts you hide from yourself - in into their gaze. That's how Becky's smile can be.

This is the biggest painting I've done so far, besides the mural I did last year. It's four feet by four feet stretched canvas. Acrylics with details in oil. The background has gold netting, canvas numbers I made and then painted (3, 5, and 9... so sharp and scary), an arm from an action figure, and a broken pair of glasses. I also used a lot of my spit to sort of get that thickened dark red look. It was late at night and I'm poor, don't judge. 

The blanket is a Tagalog translation of - of course - The Little Prince, as well as sand I took back from my favorite beach in the world, Boracay, and sea shells that were a huge bitch to adhere to the canvas.

Anyone's Immaculate

I wanted to play on the idea of Mary Mother of Jesus as a young girl, and with the obsession the Christian institution has over the notion of virginity. 

I painted my good friend Raena, with whom I always shared a critical eye in our society and an affinity for the outer edges of things. Turns out she and I are - as far as I know - the only graduates from our secondary school ever to come out as well. Perhaps that's why we got on so well growing up. 

Anyway, she's got this regal fragility to her - Victorian, really - this sort of translucent character to her skin that I just can't get over. I wanted that warm and natural glow of her skin juxtaposed against the stark white of the halo. 

Also, and obviously, the orchid is meant to evoke sex... I love orchids, they're to me the perfect coalescence of the cock and the vagina. It's like androgyny on a stalk. And so fragile and foreign looking. I could go on for miles. Acrylic on canvas.

lewis was right on the money

this stands as my sort of goodbye to the manila skyline. it came, i think, from the same place as b612; however this painting - again of nathan, whose beauty and character and twin journey to mine rendered him the closest thing to a muse i've ever or probably will ever have - was more express in its desire to break free. or to be.

it all seems so juvenile now, looking back on it all. but i don't think i'll ever outgrow my love for manila's orange sunsets, or that blistering skyline. and nathan, audacious and devil-may-care - - wearing scarves in the tropics. dreams of new york and george mallory and flight and more. that feeling sticks awhile.

the scarf is just straight up jersey cotton that i distressed and painted. the body is done in acrylics, the birds that spring from the scarf's shreds are in oil. i do still bristle a bit at the way the proportions worked themselves out on the canvas... his body just seems a little skewed. but all in all, this (and the impetus that conjured it up) are nostalgic darlings of mine.

b612 - a portrait of my best friend

this is probably my favorite painting i've done. for a couple of reasons, the first being my undying love for the little prince, my second being my undying love for nathan alexander haskell.

most of the paintings i did when i realized that painting is the most incredible did to do had to do with a concept i was pretty besotted with called "sehnsucht." like most concepts that strike a chord, it is german and untranslatable and pretentious as fuck.

but. my understanding of it, when i painted this around four years ago, went something like this: sehnsucht is somewhat akin to nostalgia. it's the itch we feel for the womb, for a savior, for a sense - an absolute and unquestioning sense - of belonging.

it's what prompted the little prince to tack himself onto a wandering flock of birds. it's that discontent that gurgles up every now and then, egging us on to grow up and out.


it in a lot of ways defined nathan and me back then. we yearned for an emancipation from the confines of our religious surroundings and our adolescent skins. we wanted out, or more accurately, we wanted up.

i painted nathan growing up from Saint-Exupery's beautiful illustration into a lifelike portrait, from watercolor into acrylic, from a dream into a reality. there is no elation here, so i guess the general message of the thing is that up isn't out at all. we'll never stop searching... or something silly like that.