This natural history artist wants you to look at the world with wonder

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During her commutes to the University of Santo Tomas campus in España, Aissa Domingo often passed by the National Museum, a cultural centerpiece in the capital near the famed Luneta Park and Manila Bay boardwalk.

Some time after graduating from UST, she walked into National Museum and asked for a job.

“I just walked in,” Domingo told Rappler in an online interview, recalling that day, 15 years later. Behind her stood an easel painting of Alpinia glabrescens, a flower from the ginger family.

“Nagtanong lang ako ano’ng available na position for a fine arts graduate.” (I just asked what position was available for a fine arts graduate.)

She landed a job at the Zoology Division and shared space with researchers in the museum. The Zoology Division is one of the oldest divisions in the museum, established in 1901 and managed by American ornithologist Richard Crittenden McGregor.

Her years in the museum, thus far, had been “eye-opening.”

“May niche na kailangang i-fill,” Domingo, 40, reflected. “Bakit walang gumagawa ng flora and fauna in the Philippines?”

(There’s a niche that needs to be filled. Why is there no one drawing the flora and fauna in the Philippines?)

When she started work at the museum, there was only one illustrator with a plantilla position. Fifteen years into the job, she’s the only illustrator left.

Illustrations of flora and fauna, of the natural world, might seem whimsical to the general public because of the attention to detail and the beauty and rarity they capture. But Domingo emphasizes first and foremost the need to be scientifically accurate.

After all, her job is to record and keep faithful accounts of life on earth — in the same vein as the natural history museum has to document the changing face of our space on the earth and the living things in it.

In Domingo’s world, photographs are not enough and drawings can be more accurate. Line drawings rendered in ink, she explained, can show the anatomy of a species.

They can show what makes a species new and distinct from the others. Patterns — the rhythms and designs that signify some semblance of order in the universe — are revealed in drawings.

“What you see is what you get,” Domingo said when asked about her style. Her art, she said, is straightforward.

Domingo did drawings as a kid. She looks back at her childhood reading and redrawing comic strips like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, printed on broadsheets her father used to buy and take home.

Looking back, she said that it wasn’t just the humor of Calvin and Hobbes that she liked, but how the artist — Bill Watterson — portrayed characters and surroundings.

“I turn to his illustrations to observe the techniques he used in drawing trees, animals, and landscapes,” she said.

As an artist, Domingo is flexible. She understands the requirements of her job, but she also gives space to create her own art.

In 2024, Domingo held a solo exhibit entitled “Secret Garden” which explored the documentation of nature and the transcience of human memory. It was a dream come true, she said.

“I painted the flora I wanted to see in the wild and some of my forest finds during hikes,” she said of her exhibit. “It is my intention to spark curiosity among viewers when they see my paintings.”

Part of her job in the museum is working with scientists and going on field work. At the museum, she would draw and take photos, tinker with exhibits and replicas, even preserve animals through taxidermy.

Jose Honorato Lozano, a painter born and bred in Manila, is one of Domingo’s inspirations. Lozano used watercolor to capture slices of life under Spanish colonial rule.

Other inspirations she cited were German naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian and Ernst Haeckel. All were pioneers in their fields.

She recalled a recent trip to the country’s highest mountain, Mt. Apo, where she took photos of birds and insects.

“The place, it’s really something. To be enveloped by mist, by the rain.” It was magical at Mt. Apo, she said.

Wide-eyed wonder in this kind of occupation is a necessary currency. Historically, humans have strived to make something of themselves, bend the world and exploit its resources to their will and purpose.

But the artist that spends time looking at and replicating nature finds herself grateful for the privilege to be a spectator in an evolving world.

I asked her what she likes most about what she does. She focused on the minuscule, “noticing the patterns, the details, observing what it’s like in the wild.”

Using contemporary jargon, she described the thrill of discovering a new species. “You’re the first Marites to know,” she said, laughing. – Rappler.com