heart evangelista unveils loves first bloom

Moonlight is excited to welcome back Philippine artist/actor/model Heart Evangelista/Love Marie Escudero. After joining us in with for the collaborative Neon People alongside Brandon Boyd, Heart returns with her debut solo release with Moonlight Love's First Bloom. Heart joined us out at the Moonlight studio to talk about this extremely personal piece that was painted at a pivotal point of her life. Read on below to find out more and be sure to grab Love's First Bloom available in two sizes right exclusively with Moonlight Arts Collective...

"I love painting and not really having a plan, you don’t know what’s going to come out. So this one I’m very excited to talk about. This was the very first painting I created when I started painting again. I had painted when I was very young but I was about 13 when I stopped, and then I did not start painting again until I was about 27. So this the very very first one that I started to do, and it was also super big. I remember looking at it and thinking how am I going to fill this up? Usually that’s the idea with a huge painting, you want to shock them, but where do you begin?" - Heart Evangelista

"With some pieces I will plan it out in a way with the colors, not with the painting itself necessarily but the structures, but for Love's First Bloom I just got a whole bunch of paint and I put it in and just started to mix, and it came out the way it is. I did not plan it. I did not study the color wheel whatsoever for this piece, and I was just painting the way it would come out, and I’m very happy, so glad that I did. I remember painting so many colors on it, and I just saw her face. It started from there..." - Heart Evangelista

"...I felt so good actually painting this, because my dad and I weren’t speaking for a long time. My dad is super conservative and he disowned me for a very long time. When he saw this painting he messaged my sister and said 'oh my god, it reminds me of this painting that I had from our house that burned down.' Maybe that was in the back of my mind as I was painting it. That painting was of three women, and I didn’t realize that it did kind of look like that. So he started to talk to me after that. He went to my house, and he got this painting and from that day on we were ok. It was just super special because it really started everything for me..."

"....After that I was just nonstop. This was part of my very very first collection of launching myself as 'a painter' under my real name, Love Marie, which nobody knew. I was afraid of the judgement and all of that, I didn’t want people to know that it was me in the beginning. So they didn’t have all these thoughts of she’s a reality tv star or whatever. So this piece was super special. I really took my time. It’s just lovely because when I paint, especially as someone who’s a public figure, you think subconsciously what everybody is saying. With this I did not care at all, and it was beautiful. It just shows what happens when you don’t care, and you can just be yourself. Allow someone to be themselves and that’s where the magic begins." - Heart Evangelista

"It really is a beautiful story, and objectively this is a beautiful painting. You could not know anything about the artist herself, and just say 'Wow. Look at this. Where is this from? Who painted this?' At least that was my reaction. I remember this was one of the first paintings that I had reacted to." - Brandon Boyd

"There are a lot of hidden meanings in this painting. People that have broke me into a thousand pieces and people that have saved me. You’ll see letters here and there. I have a lot of hidden stuff. There are some names on the painting because…well…it’s so interesting and I wanted to put it there. It’s not because you had a specific relationship, it’s just that every person that you meet in your life changes you permanently. I needed to put that into this painting. Kind of scribble it onto the painting, because the people that you meet are all over you in a sense. This was my very first painting of me painting who I am inside. I kind of owe it to all of them." - Heart Evangelista

"It’s interesting that you say this was the first painting that you had done that is you painting who you are, and what came out was 10,000 colors." - Brandon Boyd

"Definitely. Love's First Bloom was a relaunching of myself, for myself." - Heart Evangelista

"This painting was definitely done during a period of extremes. I don’t mind getting personal. When I painted Love's First Bloom I had lost everything. My mom took everything that I had. Everything that I worked for, and she never gave it back. I was penniless. I had a fan, that is my assistant now and handles my finances, she was the one who was giving me money for food. I had some nice clothes, but that was it. I had 30 pesos in my ATM card. But this time, I met my husband, and he was so nice nice and he was so good to me. But I was really going through a tough time before that. People in the industry didn’t want to work with me at the time because of the headaches that they were going to get from publicity because my parents were majorly disowning me. In the Philippines they are so conservative. If you go against your parents, that’s it. You’re shit. So I was lost. But then I was found. So this is super, super duper special this painting." - Heart Evangelista

"One of the amazing things about the prints is that people can have a tiny little piece of that story." - Brandon Boyd

"What I love about the way that you guys do it, is that it is exactly the way it is in real life. For other people when they print, sometimes they can get lost in translation, sometimes the feeling, the textures the smells will fade in a sense, but it’s captured so perfectly here I love it! I mean, I can’t believe it. I missed this painting so much! I can almost smell it. I remember, my friend gave me lavender oil, so whenever I smell lavender oil I remember my first collection." - Heart Evangelista