Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 24, 2025 : Fatima Ronquillo, a Filipino artist, painter (#2400)

Friday, October 24, 2025

Artist of the Day, October 24, 2025 : Fatima Ronquillo, a Filipino artist, painter (#2400)

Fatima Ronquillo (1976) is a self-taught painter who combines old master techniques with a playful modern sensibility to create a world where art history meets with imagined characters from literature, theatre and opera.

Born in Pampanga, Philippines in 1976, Fatima Ronquillo emigrated as a child to the United States where her family settled in San Antonio, Texas. She began exhibiting her work from the age of fifteen and is now widely collected in the United States and internationally.

Her work has appeared in numerous art publications including American Arts Quarterly, Southwest Art, American Art Collector and Beautiful Bizarre as well as in various magazines such as The Cut / New York Magazine, Tatler, Tatler Philippines, L’Officiel México, The Financial Times, Vogue Gioiello, Marie Claire and A Magazine Curated By Alessandro Michele. A monograph of her works Spellbound was published by Unicorn in 2019 and was an official selection at the 24th Annual Texas Book Festival. In 2023, a survey of her paintings was exhibited at the Millicent Rogers Museum in “Fatima Ronquillo Recollected: Portraits of Enchantment“. She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and chihuahua-terrier.

Her statement::
My childhood was spent drawing and poring over my grandfather’s issues of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest magazines. Living in a provincial town in the Philippines, I did not have access to museums and only dreamed of seeing paintings in the flesh. As an only child my companions were books and a sketchpad and I lived a very full interior world. To find myself at ten years old in San Antonio, Texas, was a cultural shock. But there were museums and big libraries and good people who mentored me before I even knew I wanted to be an artist by profession. I am almost entirely self-taught not by lack of opportunity or teachers, but because of a stubbornness to move outside of that inner world cultivated from the tenderest age.

My motivation for painting has always been to revive paintings of the past within my own pictorial language. I am a lover of art, and when I did finally see masterpieces of painting, it was a pilgrimage. I gaze at favorite artworks the way others worship a hero or a relic. I have always felt that I was born in the wrong century. My imagery would have been better suited to a time when people were aware of the mythologies associated with Olympian gods or were fluent in the Victorian language of flowers. And yet I can only have ever painted in the present for no other time in history has the plethora of images been so readily available. To sample imagery through the ages, cherry picking from the Renaissance or the Rococo for example, and to combine them into a personal narrative is unique to our times.

The need to love and be loved is a theme which has preoccupied writers and artists through the centuries. I return to it repeatedly, recalling characters from literature or opera. My invented portraits are nearly all solitary and often are of children. They are haunted by a solitude experienced by those who find themselves strangers in a strange land, simultaneously longing to escape and connect.

As an immigrant the impulse to take root is particularly strong. I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico underneath its clear vast skies and surrounded by a community of artists and writers. It feels enchanted to me and I find traces of the Philippines in its churches, santos and Hispanic traditions. But I also love the uniquely American Southwestern landscape. It is a place conducive to solitude and creation and an impalpable sense of belonging to nature. It feels a little out of time, not unlike the people and places of my paintings.

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