After a rainy and cold spring, summer slowly warmed up, and Alan returned his focus to the home and garden, where Andy patrolled the pool, and large swaths of ferns and grasses sprung up in verdant chartreuse splendor. The garden borders ran around the backyard in gracefully curving lines, and though it’s not big on space, it’s deceptively designed to draw the wanderer around corners and into shaded nooks. A towering stand of fountain grass hides a lavender lace-cap hydrangea, while the latter’s climbing cousin rambles over a worn wooden fence. Around another corner softened by a coral bark maple, a clump of lady’s fern elegantly lifts its red stems and green fronds over a carpet of sweet woodruff. A seven sons’ tree forms a canopy that joins the upper tiers of a maple, and one enters the little side yard as if going into a green tunnel. A newly-opened patch of evening primrose raises its cheery canary petals toward the sunlight, covering the base of a climbing pink sweet pea. Nearby, a clump of lavender provides a silvery backdrop for a roaming mound of lemon thyme in full white bloom. Pockets of mint are tucked in everywhere, its rampant invasiveness small price to pay for the luxury of its fresh scent wafting up whenever it is brushed. A bit of grapefruit mint offers variety and citrus effervescence.
This is the real-life setting for the fantasy-land version of ‘Once Upon A Watercolor’ and on the sunny day of a visit to Andy and Alan’s, it’s a fitting scene, one that finds the maker himself presiding in a flowing pair of colorful palazzo pants and a sheer caftan. It is exactly how one might imagine Alan flouncing about in the summer, and it surpasses expectations for sheer blatant campiness. A necklace encrusted with sparkling faux-jewels hangs around his neck, and he can’t decide whether to keep the large bright orange hat with a fuchsia bow on his head, or hold it in his hands. One is unsure whether this is for show, or if he’s out there like this every day. Both would be believable, though close friends would vouch for the latter. When it is suggested that he pose by the pool for a picture, he scoffs. Different world, different era.
A few months ago Alan purchased his first selfie-stick, and in the days since he’s used it only two times – the last one being on an anniversary weekend in Boston with Andy for a couple of shots before they went out to dinner. (“I’m not sure who tired of it first, me or Andy.”) It’s a rather shocking shift in priorities, anda telling testament to how far removed he is from the vainglorious self-obsession of modern social media, as well as his own well-documented past. (Truth be told, Ilagan has been taking selfies since his first Polaroid in 1986; there are boxes and boxes of evidence, and a sky-high pile of photo albums to back this up. If he proclaims to be tired of it, there’s no reason not to believe it; witness the steady decline and dearth of self-taken shirtless poses on his website for additional proof.)
These days his artistic output has been moving farther and farther from his own keen visage, a slow panning-out from the macro-view of introspection that he was stuck in for years to an outward-looking view of the world around him. Such movement from self-involvement bordering on self-obsession to someone looking out at the world is the sort of slow transition that can only be seen when you look back over his output for the past few years. It’s there in the evolution of projects – where once you couldn’t escape the repetitive parade of ass-shots now stands a stretch of blog posts that haven’t featured Alan in the altogether for quite some time. The bulk of his last project ‘PVRTD’ found him receding into the black-and-white background of most of his shots, if he was featured at all; ‘Once Upon A Watercolor’ doesn’t show him, his visage, or any symbolic stand-in whatsoever. There’s a certain freedom that comes from not tying yourself into your artistic output.
‘Once Upon A Watercolor’ is strikingly simple in concept. It’s a non-story that takes place in a single day – in fact, the single garden party of a day – and is mostly just a parade of the children in Ilagan’s life, and a minor flower allegory thrown in for artistic weight. A love-letter mostly to the parents of said children, it is also a sweet children’s tale – nothing much happens, no dangers or tensions present themselves, and at the end is the promise of a holiday sequel. From The Flower Party he’s throwing this summer to the annual Children’s Holiday Hour he holds in Boston each December, his recent work is a whimsical ode to childhood, the wonder and rawness to which Ilagan returns in his own watercolor works, which form the backdrop to the story.
He didn’t set out to paint the backgrounds themselves; Ilagan originally purchased a few collections of stock watercolor images featuring flowers and leaves and the like, but he was looking for something more abstract so as not to take away too much from the rhyme scheme he envisioned writing. He spent the last winter immersed in the experimental return to a favorite childhood past-time.
Perhaps slightly irksome to him, it’s typically been Ilagan’s family-friendly work that has garnered the highest praise of his creative endeavors. ‘Once Upon A Watercolor’ is no exception – several friends have remarked it is their favorite thing he’s ever done. “Something like ‘PVRTD’ will always be more thrilling and exciting to me than the lighter fare, because I’m more attracted to the darker themes when creating artistic work. ‘Once Upon A Watercolor’ is a different kind of challenge, requiring a lighter touch, which is more difficult in some ways.” It also required more editing and revisions than he’s ever done before. “The older I get, the more I realize that so much of a first draft of anything is just practice garbage. I used to be very concise and deliberate in what I put down in writing – now it’s mostly a sketch and the final version often ends up being something completely different, and hopefully better, than the initial, raw entry.”
