Tops ArtFest 2026 Plein-Air Painting Competition: ₱50,000 Top Prize, 26 Hours, No Registration Fee
Tops ArtFest 2026’s plein-air painting competition runs Oct 23-24 at TOPS, Cebu: ₱50,000 top prize, no registration fee, and 26 hours to paint.
All posts tagged: art
The Smudges Stay: Lee Cundañgan’s Hand-Painted Christmas Cards, Imperfections Included
Look closely inside some of Lee Cundañgan’s Christmas cards and you’ll spot faint smudges, the kind a print shop would wipe away before anything ships. She won’t clean them. “I refuse,” she says. To her, those marks show that a real person painted the card by hand, with paint that didn’t always go where she wanted it to. That stubbornness runs through every card in the five-design sets she’s selling this Christmas. So does a more pressing reason for selling them this year. Four Cards That Weren’t Supposed to Be a Business Cundañgan calls herself an artist, storyteller, and educator, and a “professional raketera,” Filipino slang for someone who juggles several gigs at once. Painting is one of them. Last Christmas, when she was just starting out as a painter, she made four cards for fun and didn’t think much of them. Then the compliments started coming in, a lot of them. Two close friends told her the cards deserved a proper run the following year. This year, she listened. Five Designs, Each One Built …
Stay a Little Longer: A New Cebu Play Asks What’s Left When Memory Fades
Every caregiver of someone living with dementia eventually hits the same fork: correct the version of reality the person in front of them is living in, or step inside it with them. Stay a Little Longer, the newest production from 2TinCans Philippines, builds an entire play around that fork — and it doesn’t pick a side for the audience. The show runs August 29 and 30 at The Kabilin Center in Cebu City, and it arrives with a sturdier premise than most memory-loss narratives bother with. Instead of watching a woman disappear, the audience watches her stay whole — just accessible from a different angle in every scene. Grieving child. Young wife fighting to be chosen. Physician. Mother. An elderly woman trying to place the unfamiliar room around her. Same person, several timelines, one body doing all the holding. That’s a harder trick to stage than it sounds, and it’s the reason this one is worth knowing about before opening night rather than after. One Room, Every Version of Her The entire play is set …
A Night with the Manila Symphony Orchestra: When Manila Breathes in Music
There are nights in Manila when the city feels louder than usual — not because of traffic or crowds, but because art decides to take up space. This weekend was one of those nights. The rain lingered over the bay, the streets glistened, and the world felt like it was pushing people indoors. Yet inside Aliw Theater, something powerful unfolded: a performance by the Manila Symphony Orchestra that reminded me how alive the city’s cultural pulse truly is. The MSO: Nearly a Century of Sound Founded in 1926, the Manila Symphony Orchestra has lived through war, rebuilding, cultural shifts, and generations of changing tastes — yet it remains steady, almost stubbornly graceful. It’s one of the oldest orchestras in Asia, and every performance feels like a continuation of a legacy Manila is lucky to have. Watching them isn’t just about listening to classical music. It’s about witnessing history breathing. “Dancing with Tchaikovsky”: A Dialogue of Emotion That night’s concert, Dancing with Tchaikovsky, felt like stepping into a story told not with words, but with movement …