Visual artist Naomi Banal—in her daughter’s eyes
My mother, the visual artist Naomi Banal, has a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Her tools of the trade are brushes, paints, palette knives, color jars, canvases and the like. With remarkable creativity, passion and patience, she works in her studio on her sizable canvases, mixing her paints into the most wonderful of colors, fearlessly freeing up shapes and textures that have been lodging in her mind, expressing her colorful personality through the scintillating combinations she creates for her masterpieces.
In contrast, I find myself building a career in the finance industry after completing my business degree. My work primarily revolves around analyzing numbers and interpreting data to help management make informed decisions. My day-to-day tasks involve constructing graphs, charts, and financial models while sitting at a desk in front of a glowing computer screen. My conversations are peppered with revenues, margins and enterprise value, to name a few. Corporate jargon, in other words, about which my mother will just happily smile and nod whenever I mention it during family dinners.
Some studies say that children inherit their smarts from their mother. But in my case, while my mind processes information mostly through numbers and my favorite subjects in high school were mathematics and chemistry, my mom has been very vocal about her dislike of such subjects.
While we were doing some spring cleaning a couple of years back, we discovered her high school report card with barely passing grades in math—palakol was how she described them. She wasn’t kidding: numbers were her weakness.
So, am I my mother’s daughter? The answer is a resounding yes!
Although it may not seem like it, given the stark contrast in our fields, my mom’s influence in my life has led me to the path that I am taking today. I can clearly recall how she took the time to help familiarize me with addition and subtraction through hand-drawn fruits on bond paper at home. For other subjects, her reviewers for my sister and me would contain drawings as well, which we were allowed to color in after we finished answering them.
I believe that it was this dedication of hers during my formative years that instilled in me the love for learning and the academic discipline that allowed me to complete my primary and secondary education with flying colors (yes, pun intended).
When she stopped teaching me midway through grade school because I would already rather study on my own, her support manifested in other ways. During exam weeks, she would cook my favorite dishes to keep me fueled as I studied. She supported my extracurricular sport activities and allowed me to explore hobbies such as photography and music.
I may not have inherited my affinity for numbers from my mom, but I know that she has played a major role in setting me up for success in life. Not by nature but definitely by nurture.
As my mother continues to explore endless possibilities in her career as an artist, it is now my turn to support her in any way that I can, be it by crunching some numbers for her, through my own expression of art by taking photographs of her and her works, or by simply being present during her exhibits.
“Endless Possibilities V,” Naomi Banal’s fifth one-woman show, is at Art Lounge Manila, The Podium’s Social Hall, level 6, ongoing until Oct. 29.