Manila taught me restraint. The islands taught me the opposite.
I lived in Manila for a long while, and it changed how I draw in ways I’m still discovering.
Most people imagine South East Asia as a riot of colour and scent – and much of it is. But Manila surprised me by being something else. Decades of American influence left it with wide boulevards, stark modern architecture and a kind of organised, almost Western restraint that sits in sharp contrast to its older colonial buildings and the dense, tangled life of its barangays. Overhead cables cut sharp lines across the sky. Gated expat compounds sit metres from neighbourhoods with an entirely different rhythm. The contrast isn’t subtle. It’s everywhere, all the time, and once you start seeing it, you can’t stop.
I started making pen and ink drawings of that contrast directly – the line of a boulevard against the chaos of cables, the geometry of a high-rise against older, looser architecture. And then the rain came. Manila rain doesn’t drizzle, it arrives, and I remember watching it pool on the road below from a high-rise window, the water collecting in sheets across the tarmac. I started experimenting with actual ink and water together to try to get that pooling, spreading quality on paper – something looser and more watery than my usual line work. It became one of the more interesting technical shifts in my pen and ink practice, and I don’t think it would have happened anywhere else. There’s also a wonderful local paper – Manila paper, a warm rusty yellow – that turned out to suit ink work in a way I hadn’t expected. The materials available in a place shape the work as much as anything you consciously choose.
And then there’s the other Manila – or rather, the Manila that isn’t Manila at all. My husband was flying routes through the islands at the time, and I got to see the coastline from the air more than once: white sand, untouched palm, water in colours that genuinely look unreal until you’ve seen them yourself. It felt undiscovered in a way that’s increasingly rare to find anywhere. That aerial view – the sheer scale of blue and green stretching out below – gave me a completely different register to draw from. Where the city taught me restraint and contrast, the islands gave me the opposite: saturation, abundance, colour without edges.
I think that’s the real lesson Manila gave me as a painter, more than any other single place. It isn’t one thing. It held both the precision of line that I love and the saturated colour that I love, in the same country, sometimes visible from the same window. Most places ask you to choose a register. Manila let me have both, and I’ve been working with that duality ever since.
