Happiness comes in many forms. It can be a trip, a person, a scenario, or a medically prescribed drug.

Needful Opportunities attempts to discover the intricacies of chances.

The pieces are all from a man’s perspective, the narrator, if you will. He is not in any of the paintings. He is but an observer to another’s experiences.

Here, he sees a mother doing everything to raise her daughter well.

This makes him happy.

Through his eyes, Needful Opportunities highlights the mother and daughter’s encounters with the world around them.

He sees joy in them as they go about feeding sheep and rabbits, but what he remembers most are the fishes and birds of various colors they meet along the way.

He wonders how such colors of various mixtures came about.

He thinks of the little girl and how he sees every single person he has met in his life in her. He recalls that each person was once like her, carefree, as if feeding the animals was the only thing that mattered.

He also starts thinking of how long the child’s memory of the birds and fish would last. Would it be like a Koi’s with its fleeting memory or would it be like the Raven’s believed to have one of the longest memories in the animal kingdom?

He tries to think of how he was during this tender age and finds he remembers merely snippets and random twinges of gleeful feelings but never really the complete picture.

He immortalizes the mother and daughter’s experiences. “This is happiness”.  he thinks. And pours the images on boards, CDs, and canvases. Then he mounts them on walls.

—

Panch Alvarez is a Political Science graduate from the Ateneo de Manila University (Naga). Through academic setbacks and career woes, art has kept Panch Alvarez afloat whenever he found himself in rough waters. Needful Opportunities is his first one-man show.