GRACE KALAW KATIGBAK - She paints, she dances, she performs!

At her age (68?), Grace Kalaw Katigbak considers herself more an artist than anything else but her passion for dance hasn't ebbed a bit. She believes “if I still can walk, I still could dance!” She studied ballet with Totoy Orteza “but my real teacher in ballet would be Tony Fabella and also William Morgan.

“I danced with Tats Manahan, Eddie Alejar and Tony Fabella a long time ago. We created a dance company, the Manila Metropolitan Dance Company.”

But more than a ballet dancer, she is now more engrossed in painting, an endeavor which she started doing in earnest 16 years ago. When we interviewed her early this year, Katigbak was in the midst of preparation for her solo art exhibit in New York which was held in April. She intended early one to name her exhibit “Wound” because it somehow showcased the pains and trauma of her life.

If she was so excited about the exhibit in the Big Apple it was because it was with a performance - hers! - like her two previous exhibits, “The Glamorous Guru” held at Galería Astra in LRI Bldg. Nicanor García St. in Makati last Nov. 23-Dec. 4, 2017; and “I’d Rather Be a Butterfly Than a Vaginah!” at the Ricco Renzo Art Gallery also along Nicanor García St. last Dec. 14, 2017.

No need to raise an eyebrow: Aside from being a master with the brush on canvas, Katigbak who has humor embedded in her being, attended Stand-Up Comedy class in Second City, Chicago and Clown School in Paris. She could have been a star in Philippine teleseryes but she said TV shows don't appeal to her. The only time she worked before the cameras was when she was a newscaster with Channel 13 when she was younger.

Katigbak didn't have formal lessons in painting. It was her forth husband, an English creative director who she described as “gifted,” who encouraged her to paint. “That's how I started painting 16 years ago. I owe it to him.” They are no longer a couple though, their marriage having been annulled like the other three of her four marriages.

Actually, she only finished high school, but she broadened her knowledge by reading books. And out of this passionate whiling of time, she also became a writer: writing poems and short stories, one of which won a Palanca Award.

Her mother, the late soprano Evelyn Kalaw, sent her to a modeling school in Europe where she enjoyed the freedom of youth before getting married at 17. She has two children, a girl and a boy who is bipolar, she confessed without rancor or shame. But with her traumatic childhood (among others, she said she was molested when she was only four years old) and her unhappy married life (she was beaten and abused wife, she added), she had to undergo therapy.

What came out after therapy was a better person - “I learned to forgive even myself and I felt so liberated! I learned to let go. I finally found my individual voice which I expressed through my paintings. Now I can talk about anything freely and without fear, pain or shame. This is the message I'd like to impart!”

In “Wound,” she will put into canvas the trauma and sufferings of her life. “But I will also do stand-up, I'm going to make a presentation talking about my experiences, the painstaking I went through. For my last two exhibits, I’ve done this - art exhibits with a performance or a presentation where I talked about my past unhappy life with humor. My last husband said that with such tortured and turbulent life, either of two things may happen: Life overwhelms art or it illumines it…”

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Tidbits: Happy b-day greetings today, Sept. 19, go to former Philippine Sports Commission head Peping Cojuangco, Impy Pilapil, Atty. Nelson Lidua, Dr. Nilo Apale, Dennis Herruela, Marilou Laderas, Lydia de Guzman, Danny Vibas, Fringky Palma, Gerard Ramos and Maoui David. Belated happy birthday to headwriter Aol Rivera (Sept. 18), associate producer Dani Tiongson, Patch Manela Bungubung (Sept. 15), production assistant Elisha Elaine Paquing