Guelph-based artist Patrick Cruz has recently won a $25,000 grant, courtesy of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Originally from Manila, Cruz immigrated to Vancouver while he was still in high school. He later moved to Guelph, and is currently completing a degree in Guelph’s Masters of Fine Arts program. This was the 17th year that the competition was run, and Cruz beat out a number of contestants from across Canada.
The piece that won was called Time allergy, and, as Cruz explained, served as a reflection of the construct of time.
“Yeah, so basically I’ve been using a lot of patterns and colour, as you can see. The compositions are based out of the density and the chaos in the city that I grew up in. My thesis right now is basically about researching folk cultures, and how folk artists mainly look down as a lower form of art, versus high art, and I wanted to bridge that gap—that folk language can have the capacity to be critical—so I used different patterns from different cultures to talk about those issues. Time allergy, the title of it is based on a Filipino filmmaker, named Lav Diaz […]. He makes films that are eight hours or six hours long, and in an interview he was asked why he makes films that are that long, and he said, ‘Well, it’s the idea that time is a construct—it was introduced by colonizers when they came to the Philippines,’ so I thought it was kind of this funny idea that we were allergic to modernity and time, because people would just live through the seasons. They would work when they want to work, they would eat when they want to eat—but ever since time was introduced, suddenly there’s this regiment of schedules, suddenly you have to modernize.”
Cruz also reflected on the hardships that artists often face when trying to make a living.
“Art is such a tough path. It’s sometimes not as rewarding as people think, and it’s hard to just say that ‘Oh they’re just making art and it’s not contributing to anything.’ And it’s always marginalized; when kids say they want to be an artist, and their parents always try to deter it from them, because they don’t want them to be starving. And it’s true, I think the labour and the time you put into making art doesn’t necessarily reflect back in the same way [as] working an eight hour job, so I think it’s good that people recognize now that an artist does require a lot of commitment and engagement in order to succeed in it. Otherwise it becomes a hobby, which is also fine.”
Though Cruz expressed the downfalls that are often associated with making art for a living, he also expressed why chooses to continues on his path as an artist.
“I guess for me, it’s more of a personal endeavour. It’s therapeutic for me, more than anything. But also, I think art is not that far from activism, in that you could relay a message without being overt and I think you can share interesting views in life that may not be possible in everyday life. I think it’s a privilege to have that capacity to use creative means to voice things that [can] potentially alter consciousness or alter something, or maybe just reveal something that’s not inherently obvious, and I think art has the power to do that.”