COLORS ON WHITE. The works of Ayonna Cawang, a four-year-old artist, displays life and stills in different forms at the Tam-awan Village Gallery.

Wonder how one’s love and passion for art sparked? Art is a language that talks to you based on how you see the world.

Ayonna was two and Elmo was three when they ventured into the world of art. Both children were born with parents inclined to the arts. One has a visual artist mother, one has a father that has deeply enjoys art. Children are highly influenced by what they see and their exposure to art can spark their interest and imagination. Emulating what they see from their environment, these children will draw you into the world created on their canvas to see the colors and stories from their eyes.

Ayonna loved to sing and play the guitar, but her mother noticed after her Volkswagen-themed solo exhibit that her child was inspired to express herself through art. After this, she began selling pieces of her art to doctors in exhibits.

Meanwhile, Elmo started with doodles of his daily life, what he sees and what he experiences. With the help of his parents, he started pouring the colors of his life through canvases. He painted different characters, both animate and inanimate, and exhaled life to these creatures using his brush.

Ages three, two—that early phase of child wonders. In the eyes of young artists Ayonna and Elmo, their art depicts what life is in their world. 

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The little warrior of art

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In Pinsao’s haven for the culture-savvy, the Tam-awan Village, there display about 150 paintings of a four-year-old. Riding a jeep from the town to Pinsao proper, you will find a place where culture and art bloom. Called as a haven for artists, Tam-awan Village not only showcases Cordillera culture through hut and bulul displays. The village also has its own gallery that features artworks from different artists from the region, including Ayonna. 

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The white canvas, different strokes of pastels and acrylic will surround you once you enter the village gallery that displays numerous paintings with different characters. 

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Ayonna Cawang, now four, grew up watching her mother, Eden Cawang, exhibit her art. Like Ayonna, her mother also started doing art back in her early childhood.  Mother Cawang said that her daughter’s first acrylic painting on canvas was created when she was one year and nine months old. After two months, her first painting was bought by a doctor. Ayonna goes by the same native name as her mother who is a visual artist. Mother Cawang calls her daughter’s portraits “objective paintings” because Ayonna’s subjects are often animals, flowers, and her grandparents. The child paints every object she sees and tells stories about them.

At the age of two, she started participating in art exhibits. Her first art exhibit was at the Coffee Festival of La Trinidad in 2021, and she sold another painting in the Benguet Capitol for the Cordillera Month art exhibit. When Ayonna turned three, she amazingly painted her first self portrait.

She may be known as a little artist by many, this young girl is also a warrior. As Ayonna paints her canvas with bright colors, with black and dark green as its main accents, she fights a congenital condition every day. Ayonna battles a rare disease called Biliary Atresia that makes her liver dysfunctional for the bile, a fluid created in the liver and stored in the gallbladder, is trapped in the liver causing damage and scars to liver cells. Despite this circumstance, the little warrior withstands scarrings and continues to wave her brush to manifest her love and learnings for and about the world. 

Ayonna strives to inspire other children, showing them that diseases cannot hinder her from creating a colorful world using her art tools.

Looking through the canvas on how a four-year-old warrior sees animals like horses and characters like Spongebob, her little stories of her acrylic fill me with delight. Ayonna is a child with simple strokes that reminds you of how a child is, observant and adaptive of what she sees in people around her. 

The earth warrior of pugad

The world shut down during the pandemic. But Ennsar Luis “Elmo” Modelo opened a new world while he blooms and produces colors in isolation. 

In Elmo’s exhibit, I noticed the canvas with a bear-looking creature, wearing a yellow long sleeve, and floating in a blue background. Along that wall are different works with flashy colors and distorted faces and bodies that reminded me of Picasso’s paintings. All of the works were created by Elmo and some of the works displayed were shown in his solo exhibit called “Earth Warriors.” 

As one enters the Pugad ni Art Studio in Puguis, La Trinidad, the plywood wall will welcome you. It displays earth warriors alive on the canvas of a seven-year-old artist with brimming confidence shown in his posture and smile. The child always has his hair tied in a small ponytail that keeps his hair away from his face. Like the colors in his paintings, his clothes fall on the spectrum of earth tones like brown to striking colors like orange.

According to the description of Elmo’s exhibition, the earth warriors are his interpretation of “the struggles, new realities, and nature” during the pandemic. Elmo wants to convey his advocacy on “how to protect and preserve the world they live in, beloved Mother Earth, not only for this generation, but the ones after it” through the strokes of his brush.

The art world of Elmo lit up when he was three. He started painting with the help of his father. His parents said, “Instead of the usual toys, he leaned towards crayons, pencils and sketch pads.”

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As Elmo grows, he forms his distinct art style because his subjects are painted based on his interpretation. During the pandemic when children cannot play outside because of the virus, the budding artist coped by developing his art. He wished for other children to develop a way to express themselves and their dreams.

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Elmo’s world is promising. At a young age, he uses his hands to create a big change to change the world. His care for the Earth blends with pastels and acrylics, and the beauty of his art goes beyond self-expression.

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Warriors keep culture alive

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A melting pot of different art styles, cultures, and ages is what I discovered as I explored Baguio and La Trinidad. Art can exist as long as you have a tool and a space, and it exists everywhere in these places. Culture and local art continuously live seeing that art galleries continuously flourish by giving a platform to different artists in the Cordillera region.

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As a wanderer in the worlds of Ayonna and Elmo, I saw the secure and promising future of art in Cordillera. Mixing their worlds gives you a purpose to fight daily struggles and step out of our confinements. The presence of their innocence and fresh minds fill the absence of the past years; they will create their own future and experience in art in their ways.

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— Ariza Anjeli Diola