Lain

“Lain”

Oil on canvas

24”x 24”

2021

Jessa Balag took a certificate course at the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Fine Arts, majoring in painting. Both as an artist and a mother, her practice took a background until 2018, when she started to wield her painting brushes again. Her works are characterized by faithful renderings of figures either suffused with warm tropical glows or mists that blur and move with her subjects. As a daughter of a professional baker, she has also used dough and bread as elements in her pieces, drawing not only on nostalgia and reverence for the vocation chosen by her father, but also as an interpretation of how we can knead, mold and shape our destinies by our actions.