Many artists express their raging emotions through harsh strokes and bold colours but the late social realist Elsie "Inday" Reyes-Cadapan translates her pain and the plight of the Filipina through vibrant, gleeful colours and figurations
Growing up, Magel Cadapan did not understand why her mother Elsie Reyes-Cadapan persuades her to attend special art lessons and participate in art activities and events at school. At the time, she felt she was just being groomed to be one. She remembers her mother criticising the works of Filipino artists as well as collecting their pieces through an antique shop on Mabini Street in Ermita.
Read also: A Look at the Art of Mabini Street in Ermita, Manila
Eventually, in 1974, she put up her own art shop in the popular Bohemian district and sold an unsigned painting to National Artist for Architecture Leandro Locsin. Realising how artists' names and legacies endure even beyond their lifetimes through their masterpieces, Elsie wondered if she would one day become an artist.
She continued dealing with unsigned artworks and doing buy-and-sell of paintings for quite some time until she had to stop and close the shop after being diagnosed with liver cirrhosis.
"It's now or never," Elsie said to Magel. "I will become an artist. I need to express myself."
It was 1979 and she was already forty years old, yet Elsie managed to become one of the most influential social realist artists.
Using her nickname "Inday" to sign her artworks, she began with expressionist paintings of her political and social commentaries, like the one depicting "Inang Bayan" (Motherland) with political leaders during the Martial Law and EDSA Revolution. That particular painting soon became Panorama magazine's cover. Then she moved to the works of other abstract expressionist artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Willem de Kooning, whose influences are evident in her art. Her feminism and her commentary on the position of women in society also flowed out in her art. She later tried doing wood sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, and other mediums.
Although a self-taught artist, and a respected member of the Thursday Group of artists in Antipolo, Rizal, she was able to mount a solo show at the City Gallery in Rizal Park Manila a month before the People Power revolution happened in EDSA. There she exhibited her works from 1981 to 1985, which describe her sentiments against the Marcos regime and the status of women in society.
In 1994 she mounted her second solo show at the Lopez Museum, in 1995 at the Madrigal Center in Ayala Alabang, in 2000 at the Art Space of Glorietta 4, and in 2003 at the Alliance Francaise de Manille, which was her last before passing in 2004. Who would have thought that she would live 25 more years to create art?
