A gray day on the northern border. Inside the gallery, I am surrounded by blue — not the clear blue of a spring sky, but the aqueous teal of a submerged world. Outside, the rain pelts down, the windows reflected in the glass of framed archival prints.
It’s a watery world, continued in dreamlike digital paintings of Lucia Enriquez.
Enriquez has combined environments of her Skagit Valley present and her Philippine past. These are not easy images to make out. One goes by titles and peering long into the dim layers of color: Fluid washes of white, murmurations of spirit, twist and gyre over expanses of murky blue; ghostly landmarks appear and disappear, overlaid on a field of weather icons and topographic indicators.
Sky and water merge, mirror and reflect each other, the moon wobbling in multiples; anatomical drawings of lung or heart overlay shadowy forms of trees and forests; skunk cabbage, swamp lanterns, roots dangling down like water lilies, glow yellow in all that blue, rise above the Pacific Northwest murk.
Beasts from Filipino mythology emerge. The spirit of Bakuna —the serpent dragon that eats moons, causing eclipses, earthquakes, wind, and rain — coils and spirals through sky and sea. Or Agila — the monkey-eating eagle and national bird of the Philippines — searches like Noah’s raven/dove for dry land.
The theme of climate change and ecological catastrophe becomes clear. Enriquez is reimagining the once-and-future flood, a water world in which, if we survive again, a new mythology might form.
In ancient Filipino mythology, there was also a flood, sometimes at the creation of the world, sometimes in response to an insult to the gods or a as a result of the malice or thoughtlessness of a god. In some versions, the conflict between primordial sea and sky was caused by an eagle-like bird-god who just wanted someplace to sit down.
In other versions, the bird is sent to find if the flood has receded enough for life to begin again. In this current time, the people of the Philippines might well be wondering if there will be dry land in the future, if the floods will recede again.
The theme of the flood forms a bridge between past and present.
The Philippines is one of the lowest emitters of climate warming gases, yet at the very top of nations most imperiled by climate change and natural disaster. Major cities, all situated along the coast, as well as small coastal fishing villages are in peril. The 20 or so typhoons the island nation encounters in a year are increasing in fury, destructiveness, and frequency.
In November 2024 alone, a record six — six —made landfall, causing massive flooding and destruction. Mangrove forests, natural buffers against sea swells, have been ravaged in the last century, especially around Manilla Bay where they plummeted from 133,400 acres in 1900, to 1,236 acres in 1998, to under 1,236 acres in 2022 according to the Department of Natural Resources. As the temperature rises and ice caps melt, the situation can only get worse.
And yet, if Enriquez’s digital paintings speak of this disaster, in the inundation of the land, in and of themselves they are beautiful; smooth wave forms and overlaid imagery create a narrative dreamscape that eclipses rational thought. In feeling, they do not speak in the language of fear, but instead in a language of rebirth, of hope.
In seeking land, the eagle Agila, as a species endangered itself, merges roles with the traditional diety Amihan, protector of the environment, offering, perhaps, the possibility of a harmonious union between humanity and nature.
Nowhere in this show is hope more apparent than in Enriquez’s most beautiful images: “Swamp Lantern” and “Million Year Light.” In these large paintings, Enriquez blends the singular Pacific Northwest phenomenon of the flowering of the skunk cabbage in earliest spring with something much more Eastern.
“Swamp Lantern,” an alternate name for the Western skunk cabbage, presents the yellow flowers at the lower third of the picture plane, glowing before a barely discernable tangle of forest. Viewers see the surface of the water as Bakuna, scaly, seems to swirl above in the stormy sky.
“Million Year Light” presents the blooms at the upper third of the plane, floating on their leaves as on a cloud. Beneath the water, fishy forms dimly moving though the dangling threads of their roots and the suggestion of, yes, mountains, landforms, rising on the upper right in a calming sky.
This is an odd image: Swamp lanterns do not have dangling roots, but waterlilies do, which these resemble — as does the lotus, the flower of purity that rises above pollution and promises rebirth. In Philippine mythology, the lotus is associated with Amihan, the eagle-like deity, who searched for dry land and rescued the first people of the earth.
Belief systems of the Philippines are syncretic, as in all old cultures — the old beliefs swimming beneath the surface like palimpsests — and the lotus, of course, is significant in Buddhism.
For me, Enriquez’s digital painting reads like a homage to the Ratnasambhava Buddha, to that golden-yellow being, sitting on his lotus throne, emitting a million rays of light to bless all sentient life. “Million Year Light” could be read as a prayer for equanimity, for peace over despair, or perhaps as a prayer for the million years it might take for a new earth to be reborn.
In these unsettling times, Enriquez’s incipient mythology offers a watery apocalypse and a saving prayer for rebirth.
