Plet Bolipata

Plet Bolipata: Welcome to Her Playful Palette

Text by Pam Brooke A. Casin

A LIVING AND FEISTY TESTAMENT that the impossible and the unlikely can be achieved, visual artist Plet Bolipata has stopped short at nothing to do what she desires and to fulfill what others have not. But, this isn’t so much about culling heaps of awards every chance she gets (although you may consider her an achiever in every sense of the word), securing large sums of paycheck every so often, or churning out one-woman shows after the other like an assembly line. What Plet has accomplished is beyond overrated fame and fortune. An interloper, she broke into the art circle with a confident bravado and never looked back.

Realizing she wanted to become a full-fledged artist dawned on her when she found herself loving the intoxicating smell of oil saturating the house of painter Federico Alcuaz. For Bolipata, that was her ‘aha!’ moment. It didn’t matter that she doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to draw or that her international background on computer science won’t help her in the bold path she wants to take. It also probably didn’t occur to her that pursuing the arts is like thrashing yourself onto a massive net that would either catch and keep you from falling or hurl your body back to wherever you first came from.

Purging her artistry, Bolipata went as far as buying all the art materials she would need and teaching herself how to paint.  She recounts studying law in the morning and painting to no avail at night, but she quit law school eventually. She picked and held a paintbrush at 28, and she had her first one-woman exhibit at 30, just two short years after she valiantly chose to satiate her avant-garde spirit by creating and conceiving art. 

 “I would ask my friends to see some of my paintings and they all said my plans of becoming an artist would be futile. Hindi sila masyadong bilib,” she narrates. However, setting a deadline for herself, the persevering Bolipata went to Penguin Gallery in Malate and dropped her portfolio there inconspicuously. “I didn’t tell them I was a Bolipata because it’s kind of known in the musical world (her brother Coke Bolipata was already an acclaimed violinist at that time), so I used my grandmother’s nickname Sayong (from Rosario).” 

Bolipata then received a call from the gallery and instantly asked her to prepare a solo show. The artist wasted no time. “It was exciting,” she notes. “I was shocked because I was an outsider artist. I would read about Rock Drilon and Nunelucio Alvarado but I didn’t know them.” Bolipata describes how surreal it was to be in the same league with celebrated painters—one of them she would later meet and become her husband. She was able to sell all her paintings and after, she flew to New York to formally study visual arts.

Now, Bolipata has risen among the ranks and is identified for her unorthodox and modern opuses, depicting childlike grandeur through the use of flamboyant and garish palettes. Color has always been her strength, she says, as she was heavy-handed with form. Her works are completely polar opposites of her husband-artist Elmer Borlongan who is acclaimed for his unparalleled draftsmanship.

But what Bolipata lacked in aesthetic and technical structure, she made up and atoned with her quirky ideas, eloquent vision, and character. Greatly influenced by the impressionists, most especially by Édouard Manet with whom she have found “wisdom and solace,” Bolipata’s pieces push the envelope and shatter conventions. Hers are narratives that are visually exciting, as in a novel that is a page-turner—one that touches and awakens your senses. Hers are works with textured images spun from her head, with seemingly baffling and cathartic concepts, and with an eccentric sensibility, as also seen in her paper collages.

Guided by a philosophy that “nothing there is what it is,” Bolipata reveals you can still push things as far as they can go and they will still be authentic.  Asked what she hopes to achieve with her art, Bolipata answers “greatness” at once and then chortles, as if amused by what she thought of. But then she recovers and says, “I want to impart perseverance and to inspire others that it can be done, if only for that, then that’s okay.” True enough, it appeared Bolipata is quite content. Why? “Art found me a husband. It built me my home. It gave me this life.”  Touché!