{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60849,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"138","artist":"Justin Nuyda (1944 - 2022)","title":"Search","starting_price":800000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1974 (lower left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"24\" x 28\" (61 cm x 71 cm)","property":" PROPERTY FROM THE F. SIONIL JOSE COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Leading modern and contemporary painter Justin Nuyda lived two lives. In one, he was a prolific abstract artist whose more than five-decade-long career was marked by prestigious awards and cultivated close friendships. On the other hand, he was a famed lepidopterist, or a specialist on butterflies, with a career equally illustrious as his artistic one. It is these two vastly different career paths merged hand-in-hand that have elevated Nuyda’s art into something that is both magical and grounded. <br><br> \nNuyda’s fascination with butterflies began as a familybonding hobby. “Yung father ko and his brothers—anim sila na magkakapatid—all collect,” he said in an interview. “It all started when my eldest uncle, Rene, saw this guy who was collecting butterflies.” <br><br> \nThere wasn’t a system with which the Nuydas studied them back then. They started naming them based on their looks and forms, calling them vampire, spotty green, cabbage, or even something simple like Cinnamon, Fairy, or Batman. <br><br> \nThe first generation of Nuydas who studied the butterflies was followed by a second generation, led by Justin Nuyda himself. <br><br> \n “The earliest butterfly I caught was when I was in grade school. I was 6, I even cried. I pointed it to my father, di ko nahuli but nahuli n’ya,” Nuyda said, as quoted in Jay Bautista’s The Two Lives of Justin Nuyda. “At 12, I was already catching butterflies. I would hear stories from butterfly collectors describing what they could not catch then I would go to the place to look for them. I would even go up when before there were no trails.” <br><br> \nAs such, Nuyda managed to surpass his father and his uncles in this study, for whom butterfly catching is more than a mere bygone activity. So great was his contribution to lepidoptery that he has a butterfly named after him, the Delias nuydaorum, the first to be named after a Filipino.\n It is the butterfly and the beauty of them that greatly inspired Nuyda, even in his artworks. With Cesar Legaspi’s advice to him in high school (“You cannot go wrong with nature, it is always right”), Nuyda’s works are composed of colors that should have clashed but instead blend in a symphony of colors. <br><br> \nThis 1974 Search echoes that fantastical color scheme with which he is famed. Shades of yellow and blue are interspersed into a canvas of black and white, an abstraction of what he may have seen up in the mountains during his butterfly catching. <br><br> \n “This is why I entitle my artworks, ‘Search Mindscape,’” he said in a 2021 Manila Bulletin article. “There will always be a narrative behind my artwork that will be challenging to express [...] On the other hand, viewers, in their individual ways, can define and redefine, with open-mindedness, the mindscapes that I paint.” <br><br> \nNuyda’s butterfly collection had garnered international recognition, whose quantity rivals that of the Senckenberg Museum in Germany and the British Museum of Natural History. As such, it is no surprise that his abstract works take on the quality of lepidoptery, his self-proclaimed first love. After all, it takes a special sort of eye to see the beauty of these fascinating creatures, and Nuyda’s works are a manifestation of the talent and charm. (Hannah Andrea Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":null,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":null,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"UNSOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":1500000,"hammer_price":null,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66864,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/138.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":67212,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/138c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":67211,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/138b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":67210,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/138a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":137,"next":139,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}