Painting with Earth - by Joannes Paulus Tolentino Hernandez

 Painting with Earth

"As long as our value system continues to unify our well-being from a part organic and a part spiritual, we will find our existence genuine and our uniqueness innate wherein the aesthetics enriches us to appreciate more the enigma of creation as an immortal truth." 

- Joannes Paulus T Hernandez

Paintings by Joannes Paulus Tolentino Hernandez

Verses by Dr Abe V Rotor

Living with Nature School on Blog

Lesson on former Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid with Ms Melly C Tenorio 
738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday

These are paintings made of local materials, principally earth mixed with paint and applied by hand and brush. These were made by Joannes Paulus Tolentino Hernandez, a student of mine in environmental science at the De La Salle University in Dasmariñas, Cavite, in 2002. I stumbled on these experimental paintings on paper among my old files, and realized how unique they are with the use of earth as medium to express man's submission to nature and a holy spirit.     

Plate half full, half empty,

abandoned, morsels spill 

for lack of taste or appetite,

hunger far from fill. 

what a waste, grace defiled,

sans prayer and will.  

Labyrinth in a fish tank 

with just a start and end,

in between a maze looms

endless in every bend, 

decoying the bold or lonely

to a test to the end.     

A subterranean window 

with new life's beginning;

it is the return of a lost spring

long in peaceful slumber;

window of a cave dwelling,

after the Armageddon. 

A cross, but what does its color tell us,

but blood, precursor of dust and ash? 

Arise from the earth once more, oh man!

Would you be a Homo sapiens again? 

Or a genie, and no longer his master? 

Will you too, be both sane and insane? 

"The transformation of energies and the conversion of the inorganic to organic nourishment of photosynthesis is the authentic nature of Genesis from which everything else follows." - Joannes Paulus T Hernandez