EP73: Gregory Halili's Ode to Home | Miniatures, Coral, Pearl, Filipiniana, Recollections, Discovery

Thomas Wolfe’s celebrated and posthumously published novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” contains this reflection: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame.” For the Filipino expatriate artist Gregory Raymond Halili, the author might have upbraided him: “You can’t go back to your country.” This was the existential crisis Halili had to confront and resolve. Halili’s experimental work on shells as a painting ground awakened a deep desire to return to the Philippines. He had left as a child when his parents migrated to America. In his early years as an artist, he discovered his subject matter by painting Filipiniana themes in miniatures. While miniature painting reached its peak in the Mughal tradition, it also alluded to the then-prevailing Filipino artistic customs, such as “miniaturismo” and “costumbrismo.” Now settled in the Philippines, Halili relishes the abundance of natural materials, such as shells and corals. The imagery of death haunts these works. The shells are painted, seemingly etched, with the human skull. The shell itself echoes the bald cranium. The magnified close-up of an eye seems to remind us that it once occupied the now hollow socket of the skull. If the eye glistens with sadness, Halili has captured the essence of nature and humanity. His surreal juxtaposition of corals, arranged to form a human skeleton, also expresses Halili’s correspondence between nature and man, now stripped of mortal flesh. Gregory Raymond Halili is emblematic of a Filipino torn between the material wonders and comforts of the Western world and the irresistible call of one's native roots. Now that he is no longer a “fugitive” from his own country, his art continues to flourish in his imagination, giving voice and expression to all the possibilities of his experiments and explorations. The artist has been released from the disquiet and discontent of being sundered from his origin and roots. The Filipino expatriate artist has returned home.