Beauty’s Honest Labors: Jeff Dizon

If the finished canvas is fruit of the artist’s toil, then his hands are his earnest laborers that cultivated his artistic plot. As the featured artist of the month, Jeff Dizon paints a contemplative series of works depicting the labors of Philippine rural life, his ode to the humble, the strong, and the beautiful.

Soft Faces, Hard Hands

Jeff Dizon’s pieces exhibit the strength borne from honest toil, the quiet endurance of the women as beautiful as they are powerful, unbreakable. In the spirit of his long history of art and social activism, Dizon’s art not only paints the beautiful, as he injects a strong bite of brutal honesty as the accent to his pieces.  The expression ‘work one’s fingers to the bone’ is perhaps the strongest and the most literal metaphor used here; his subject’s hands are testaments of their hard work, worn and hard from the everyday grind.

Dizon artfully captures the beauty in one’s humble work. And the work he puts in creating them only underscores his committed and staunch work ethic: the fine details matching the intensity of the subject’s expressions – the end result is raw, exquisite and powerful.