Gregory Halili was born in the Philippines and immigrated to the United States of America as a teenager. His memories of childhood years, so rich with visual texture and fabric-visits to butterfly jungles, vistas of skies filled with wispy clouds and silhouettes of palm trees in the night, a kind of tropical paradise-are ever present in his mind and indeed, in his work. In this miniature orchid series, Halili turns to the weather of the tropics, the heat, the light, the perfume in the air, the lush green foliage and profusion of orchids. Each of the orchids is viewed in great detail, each a detail of the central cores of the orchid, each an intimate inch and half oval on a creamy 14×10 inch paper. Halili never paints the entire flower, he zeroes in to the most sensual, voluptuous heart of the matter. His pallet ranges from violet to red to orange to gold to white in this suite, which depicts a multitude of different orchid species.
Growing up in the Philippines, Halili was surrounded by the abundance of this most intriguing of flowers, as well as its range with thousands of species. The orchid is the flower most closely associated with humans, in particular with female anatomy. In Halili’s “bird’s eye” views, the central core is at times abstract, at a times abstract, at times like an oyster with pearl nestled in its folds, at others, rippling petals frame the flower’s inner structure. Each of the orchids is focused around one color, a brilliant fuchsia, a dazzling gold. His orchids have patterns, ribbons of ribs in the petals, dots and dashes of color surrounding the central nucleus.
In this series, more than any other, Halili creates tone in paint, using watercolor with gossamer dusting of metallic powder on the top layer of paint leaving a shimmer on
the surface. Clearly enamored of his subject, Halili discovers a new way to depict the orchid’s mystery. Halili paints this bewitching flower, which has been painted through
the centuries, in fresh new way. While looking back to paintings of earlier eras in lunettes, his vision of the orchid is fresh and contemporary.
Gregory Raymond Halili was born in Manila, Philippines in 1975. He received his B.F.A from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His works has been shown at the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York; Artists’ House Gallery, Philadelphia; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers Society of Washington, D.C; Hammond Museum and Sculpture Garden, New York; Jorge Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines, Quezon City; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York; and West Gallery, Manila, Philippines.
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