“AVOCADO,” a painting by PACITA ABAD

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

“Avocado” by Pacita Abad

(6’x6’, oil on canvas with stitched mirrors, 2000)

[First published in MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION by Eileen R. Tabios, 2018)

Pacita Abad was born on Batanes, a small island in the South China Sea. Her 32-year painting career began when she left
the Philippines in 1969 due to her student political activism against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, and traveled
to the United States to study law. However, a few years after receiving a Master of Arts degree in Asian History from the University of San Francisco she switched careers to dedicate her life to art. She then studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Art Students League in New York City. Since that time, Pacita Abad never stopped being a gypsy artist and painted the globe while working on six different continents and traveling to more than 50 countries. During her career Pacita Abad created over 4,500 artworks and her paintings were exhibited in more than 200 museums and galleries around the world.

I was honored and blessed to receive permission from the estate of Pacita Abad (1946-2004) to feature her abstract assemblage, “Avocado” (2000), on the front cover to my book MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (Dos  Madres Press, Loveland, OH, 2018). My thanks to her estate executors Jack and Kristi Garrity. "Avocado" is the painting situated within the white and blue square border on my book's cover--see above.

The painting “Avocado” is a square (6’x6’) oil on canvas with mirrors stitched upon its surface. I was interested in featuring “Avocado” on the cover of my book because I consider a poem to be, among other things,
a mirror to its reader(s). The poet begins a poem; the reader finishes it, and does so with their interpretation. The latter means the reader brings to the poem what ultimately will become
(one of) its significance—in this sense do I consider the poem
a “mirror” as the poem also becomes about or reflects back its reader. There are nine mirrors on the canvas—while their alignment (3 x 3) promotes the visual characteristic of harmony, it’s the plurality of the number that is significant to me for reflecting the idea that the same poem can generate different significances or reflections from different readers, or from more than one reading by the same reader.

I also chose “Avocado” to be on my book’s cover because I admired the painting’s presentation of the color pink. “Avocado” may be only the second time I’ve admired the use of pink in
a painting (the first would be pink’s appearance in several of Philip Guston’s works). Color is a narrative and I admire what I deem to be the stubborn optimism and improbable rebellion of pink. The optimism is also affirmed, in my opinion, by the use of bright yellow in the painting.

My admiration for Pacita Abad’s “Avocado” may be best expressed through a poem. I present such a poem below, which also begins from taking its starting point from another mirror, John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.” (This poem is from my “The Ashbery Riff-Offs” series wherein each poem begins with one or 1-2 lines from John Ashbery’s poem.) The sense of optimism I felt in Pacita Abad’s poem is also reflected in its title that references a smile—this fits, too, with my belief that making a poem or any artwork is, or can be, an act of optimism because it is, or can be, an act of Faith.

Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Smile’s Identity

“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at

in the mirror, though no one can claim

with accuracy why a transgender clad


in an outfit of broken mirrors always

reflects the traffic as faces bathing in

tears. Marina Abramović lovingly but

starkly provided weeping portraits in her

eyes of dark glass staring back at those

willing (or compelled?) to reveal secrets:

“The Artist Is Present” (2010), perform

-ance, Museum of Modern Art, New

York. Still, another artist, Pacita Abad

offers an alternative path for the reflected

pilgrims willing to swallow pain in

order to release it. There is color, and


color is a narrative. With “Avocado”

(2000), mirrors stitched on canvas, its


nine mirrors cannot be ignored—they


are front, center, and frame. Yet their


shiny surfaces cannot distract the eye


from pink, a color that surely must be

associated with pure delight. The yellow

—sunlight, why not?—can only affirm

pink’s pleasure. To feel the caress of these

two colors before turning eyes to the mirror

is to elicit the image of yourself smiling.

For once, the smile will suffice. Your


breath expands to loosen the tightness


in your chest. You are “being” not “not-

being.” In more than one mirror, you


see yourself beginning to smile. Sunlight

collaborates with you. Smile! Yellow is


the color of the avocado’s interior seed.

Smile! Fossil evidence indicates avocado

species existed millions of years ago. To-


day it thrives as a sequential hermaphrodite.

If its existence—nay, popularity!—continues

despite switching sexes daily, so can you

internalize pain to birth anew. Be like


the avocado: see yourself, then accept!
Then see yourself again. Love. Smile!


*****

Eileen Tabios loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1, and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. Forthcoming is WITNESS IN A CONVEX MIRROR which will inaugurate Tinfish Press' "Pacific response to John Ashbery" as well as THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019). She also invented the poetry form “hay(na)ku” whose 15-year anniversary in 2018 is celebrated at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.