MANILA, Philippines - Teresita Sarmiento Duldulao, whose last exhibit was held more than a decade ago, returns to the scene with an exhibit of new works starting July 16 in the SM Art Center of SM Megamall.

To cut the ceremonial ribbon is National Artist Napoleon V. Abueva.

All the paintings on display are still life of fresh flowers and old artifacts. Most of them were lent by art collectors.

An annex exhibit will be held in Old Manila bookstore, composed of figure paintings and sketches in pastel and landscapes in watercolor.

Duldulao one of the finest pastel painters of still life in the Philippines. To see 40 of her paintings in one setting is to be reminded that discipline, hard work, deliberation and a spider?s patience are still the chief virtues of the art.

Her fare is simple: flowers and objects on a table. What draws the viewer to her work is not that her subject matter is commonplace, but its ambition as pure painting.

The mediation between the viewer?s eye and the artist?s work is limitless. Her imagery imposes a closed world, a world on hold, a world of ?infinite duration,? reinforced by the subtle changes of color and air flow among the props of her still lifes, which are also the normal objects of her home life or, to be more specific, her studio.

Duldulao?s studio is a paean to an epoch when homes were built with a sense of permanence, to be handed down from one generation to another. It was built in the early 1980s of material which came from dismantled ancestral houses all over Luzon.
The door was designed around a Sto. Niño relief, over 150 years old, which Duldulao bought from the late Virginia Ty-Navarro.

The walls were built of bricks used by the Americans to build the cold storage and ice plant at the turn of century, which was torn down in the late ?70s to give way to LRT tracks.

The studio is a short walk on flagstones of piedra china from the house proper.
Once inside, the artist?s personality dominates every nook and corner, reflecting her taste and civilized state. Colonial furniture, silverware, dynasty porcelain and rare artifacts mingle with ancient baskets and cloth woven by tribes in the hinterlands. This is Duldulao?s sanctum sanctorum. No one is allowed inside, not even her grandchildren whom she dotes on.

Her husband is writer and publisher Manny.

There is no studio in this country quite like Duldulao?s. One can imagine her at peace in this world she created, spending long hours unfolding tiny petals with her pastel sticks with ardor and skill. One writer calls it self-torture; I call it sweet madness, the kind that beguiles an artist in the quest of excellence.

More often than not, her paintings focus on flowers and old artifacts. Flowers provide her with the challenge to release form and color. She sees colors a layman fails to discern.

?For example,? she says, ?there are several tones of white in one lily.? It takes her eight layers of pastel dust to render a Ming jar or a copper pot.

Duldulao paints with history in her mind, with all her mentors behind her when she faces an empty Canson paper. Tutors include Dutch and Flemish masters, Chardin (in whose still lifes the last vestiges of story have vanished), Odilon Redon, and even William Harnet, the great American master of the trompe l?oeil.

Also present are Dr. Toribio Herrera, Guillermo Tolentino, Irineo Miranda and Dominador Castañeda, who were her professors at the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts in 1951-1954.

But her main tutor has to be Edgar Degas (1834-1917), who used pastel to develop his themes, all of which show his preoccupation with catching a central motif that gives permanent value even to the most transitory subject.

Degas, one of the greatest draftsmen of all time, successfully bridged the gap between the Old Masters Tradition and modernity.

Duldulao continues to be overwhelmed by Degas? meticulous but innovative craftsmanship, and the passion to work and rework the same subject, as she does, to achieve ever greater understanding and perfection.

Duldulao?s career as a painter started late?she did not even have a solo exhibit until she was 50, but it proves durable.

Although her exhibit at the SM Art Center is the largest she has ever held, it is still a provisional report. Three days later, she will be 76. She can accomplish more. She, in fact, is still peaking.