Justin Nuyda’s Mindscape Series combines his surrealist art style with his self-proclaimed first love: the butterflies. An avid lepidopterist (or a butterfly specialist), Nuyda spent a lot of his time in the great outdoors. He was influenced largely by his family, who bonded over the same hobby.
\n“My father and his brothers—there were six of them—all collect,” he said in a mix of Tagalog and English as quoted in a 2021 Esquire article by Teresa Marasigan. “It all started when my eldest uncle, Rene, saw this guy who was collecting butterflies.”
\nThus began an impressive love affair. Nuyda trekked mountain ranges, hiked forest trails, and reached summits, all in rapt fascination with the beautiful insects. “His love affair with the visual arts and the natural world” as his daughter Ayni Nuyda described it merged with this fantastical series that showed the ‘mindscape’ of the human being.
\nAs a landscape painting aimed to portray a physical location whether it be the mountains, the seas, or the city, it makes sense that a mindscape reflects someone’s emotions and inner turmoil. In Nuyda’s case, he fashions it after the majestic views he might have seen during his trips into nature, alluding to the skies and the light in his surrealist and abstractive works.
\nThe colors, in particular, are heavily lifted from nature. “For my art, I get some colors from butterflies,” he said. “Do you know that butterflies have unusual color combinations? You usually won’t do those combinations. It’s a mistake. But when you see them in butterflies, ang ganda. The color composition, saturation, gradation—ang ganda [it’s beautiful].”
\nThis particular mindscape bleeds heavenly blues and warm bright orange. The main focus of the painting is the swirls and folds of colors placed at the dead center of the canvas. It stretches upwards, from top to bottom; it is reminiscent of the rolling clouds when one stands at the top of a mountain, sheets of white as far as the eye can see.
\nJustin Nuyda’s Mindscape series is a nuanced, emphatic look at the beauty of nature, its colors glowing as though viewed through the iridescent wings of a butterfly. The result is a mix of surrealist landscapes that echo the tumultuous inner lives barely shown in public, all done in swooping curves and daring colors that precisely describe their hidden feelings.
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