For Inday Cadapan, exposure to the arts was an essential element that fueled her creative process. While also emphasizing the importance of sensitivity to one's surroundings, for emotions play a crucial role in artistic expression.

By Art+ Team
April 25, 2024

Inday Cadapan, known affectionately as Inday, still continues to charm her patrons with a dazzling display of forms, colors, and feminine truths. Her art celebrates the beauty of the female experience and her dedication to portraying the human experience through vibrant forms and colors. Despite being labeled aktibista, basurera, and naïve artist, Inday had always remained unfazed and she responded with her trademark smile.

For Inday, her exposure to the arts was an essential element that fueled her creative process. Yet, she also emphasized the importance of sensitivity to one's surroundings, because she believes that emotions play a crucial role in artistic expression. “If you’re sensitive, you react and you swell with emotions. Other people express their emotions in other ways, like singing, dancing, or composing. In my case, I translate these emotions into forms and colors,” she says.

One of Inday's greatest strengths as a visual artist lies in her unbridled passion for colors. She approaches her palette with an intuitive understanding of emotions using colors to convey mood and feeling in a way that resonates with her truth. She firmly believes the harmonious combination of colors accurately captures an artist’s sentiments as Inday's art is deeply rooted in her personal experiences and relationships.

The portraits in this collection represent her early experiences and sentiments growing up in Bayawan, Negros Oriental. As a sickly child confined to her bed, Inday found solace and inspiration in the prints and magazine clippings adorning her bedroom walls. These photos of strange people and landscapes served as her initial exposure to the world of art which sparked her imagination and fostered a deep connection to the stories behind each portrait.

This captivating exhibition portrays Inday’s care for her community where she listened to people's sentiments and recorded her interpretations of personal experiences, events, and people around her through colors, lines, and texture. Art indeed serves as a way of seeing our inner world—our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings and emotions, our loves and aversions, but, most importantly, art can evoke feelings of nostalgia through encapsulated memories in a complex combination of feelings. 

“Sentiments” by Inday Cadapan will be on view from April 20 to May 4, 2024, at Art Lounge Manila in The Podium, Mandaluyong.

For more information about Art Lounge Manila, visit www.artloungemanila.com. You may also check their social media pages, FB/IG/YT: @artloungemanila, for more details. For collectible, functional and wearable art, shop at www.gfemporium.com