Capturing the essence of something as strong and as powerful as nature or something as nostalgic as a certain place or an object is never an effortless task. In photographing and painting nature, you battle with transient light and fickle weather. In arresting an evocative place that has become close to your heart or an object that you have become attached with, you tend to be as determined and gritty as possible to render it ultimate justice. In the long run, you tire yourself over the littlest of details or end up debating with yourself as to whether you did alright. But then doing and accomplishing either one takes you to a place within yourself.

Visual artist Phyllis Zaballero is a master of capturing the spirit of places and of things. From windows, tablescapes, façades of old houses and structures to little landscapes, she has painstakingly translated them all in canvas and in paper. Her colorful works are very obvious. They are representations and documentations of the memorable places Zaballero has seen and visited in her countless sojourns since childhood. For a long time now, the visual chronicling of these places laden with meaning has been fundamental to Zaballero’s art-making.

“I like objects and nature and so I show and paint them.  I never paint anything that I don’t know personally,” Zaballero says. “I also paint from what I remember such as places I grew up in and lived in or places where I was happy at. I do my studio a lot.”

Although Zaballero resides in Quezon City, her atelier is in the heart of old Manila—in a flat inside 72-year-old North Syquia Building in Malate. Spacious and filled with potted greens, her workplace is a hodgepodge of sorts and gives off a vintage vibe. Immediately greeting guests, one part of the studio’s wall is packed full of posters from the artist’s previous exhibits. Zaballero calls it her “ego wall.” Tubes and tubs of paint, brushes of different sizes are lined up on another part of the atelier. But most of her stock paints are inside an antique dental cabinet made of wood. Zaballero mentions she’s sort of apprehensive about running out of paint so she buys them in bulk.

Ceiling-high shelves are crowded with art books she has amassed from her trips. Some of them are mostly about Pablo Picasso—Zaballero’s idol. On one cabinet are Zaballero’s photo albums arranged in a neat file. Pieces of paper containing notes, schedules, and encouraging words and adages, on the other hand, are posted and collaged on another wall. An old rubber tree planted across North Syquia, seen outside her window, acts as one of Zaballero’s inspirations when painting.

Zaballero could not have been a painter had she not dared to take a giant leap after she graduated from the school of economics at the University of the Philippines in 1960. Her leap paid off well—a hundredfold, if you may. She finished magna cum laude from the College of Fine Arts of the same university in 1978, bagged the CCP 13 Artists Award right after graduation, and went on to become one of the most respected and critically acclaimed artists today.

“My parents won’t let me become an artist back in the day. They say that I would become bohemian. Also, they wanted me to be ‘respectable,’” she relates.  “I was obedient so I took economics. I hated it. I went through it.  When the youngest was four, I knew that I had to do something because I was not happy. I knew I wanted art. It pays to be young and energetic so I went to fine arts and juggled all of my duties.”

Zaballero’s growing up in the States and in Europe didn’t hinder the artist from acclimatizing herself in the local art scene. For what it’s worth, she already had notions about art even before she decided to settle in the Philippines after her father had died. She was exposed to a lot of it abroad.

“From first grade up to the second year of high school, I was in the States. From the second year of high school to the third year of college, I was in Europe. In the schools that I went to, aside from art and drawing classes, every so often we would go on field trips to museums. Also in Boston, we lived very near the Museum of Fine Arts,” she says.

She adds: “My friends and I were always wandering in the museum. That was maybe the first time that when I was looking at art, I was thinking, ‘Wow, I want to do this!’ Later on in Europe, I always took time out to see art shows. But I didn’t do that much art-making because I was so busy.”

But Zaballero wasn’t into representational art at the onset. At 14, she was lured by Jackson Pollock and his revolutionary abstract expressionist works.

“My early memory was being in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I saw my first Pollock there. They had just bought a Pollock and it changed my whole life,” Zaballero muses. “I thought, ‘This is it! This is something!’ So from then on, I liked abstraction. And so when I went to UP, tamang-tama kasi we were doing abstraction with Chabet. But down deep, I still knew that I wanted to do figuration because I drew so well. You have to confront what it is you can do. But I was in denial. So I did very abstract works for the first 10 years after I graduated.”

Slowly however, Zaballero came to realize that the basis of her abstraction is really reality. From being an abstractionist who painted only thick impastos and lines in a monochromatic palette and in grids, Zaballero embraced color and unleashed the figures wanting to get out from her austere and linear paintings.

“What is this? Why am I doing all these squares?” Zaballero would ask. “And then I realized that I’m surrounded by grids—the windows, floors, rooms, our streets are on a grid. The whole world is run by a right angle so I said, ‘Actually, what I’m painting is my environment,’ and I would just fit my little landscapes, abstractions within those grids so I thought of opening them up.”

Ten years later, Zaballero started to paint windows and the rest is history.

Now, Zaballero’s colored opuses are softened and made elegantly dramatic, according to art critic Cid Reyes, by swirling and flowing lines, elaborate arabesques or repeating geometric forms that echo the forms of animals and plants, and fancy filigrees. Hers are pieces that are accentuated by plants and vines and lavender and pink blooms.

Her tablescapes are reminiscent of the sumptuous meals she had the pleasure of sampling. But always, there are no figures or humans present in her artful frames, only the mere sign of human presence, as seen in a half-finished plate of bread, the disarray of silver cutlery on a red-clothed table, or the broken and misplaced crab legs on a bamboo slab.

In that sense, Zaballero beautifully captures scenes with a prolific and confident brush. She paints her subjects with much joie de vivre and passion. And in turn, not only is Zaballero able to excite and give joy to her audiences through her wistful and contemplative art but is able to be an artist in the truest sense—an artist who, in the words of Picasso, is “a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”