Arts

He had a solo exhibit at Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art at age 17 and won a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) while still in high school. But in the art world, critical success doesn’t always lead to earnings, which may explain why this edgy painter from the Philippines recently moved in with a sister: The 32-year-old Guingon is trying to save money to buy a house. Most of his works are in storage.

One of 11 children, Guingon has been in America since childhood, when a sister married a Navy man. While his paintings often twist traditional images in radical ways, Guingon is a traditionalist when it comes to family: He stays in close contact with his parents and siblings both here and in the Philippines, and returns to the Philippines regularly. He was there for three of the first six months of this year. “I wanted a different environment to paint,” he says, sitting in the corner of a strip-mall Starbucks, with a laptop, on a rainy afternoon. Wearing shorts and a blue-check button-down shirt, he’s remarkably wholesome-looking for a guy who likes to casually juxtapose sharply contrasting images, the mundane with the menacing—barnyard animals targeted by weapons of mass destruction, for example, or a herd of cows standing amid cannons in front of a house in a painting that evokes survivalist paranoia. It is titled Do Not Come In. “I try not to force a concept in a painting,” Guingon says. “It forms naturally.”

His talent first caught the public eye in 1995. He was still attending Norfolk’s Governor’s School for the Arts when he won the first of three grants awarded to him by the VMFA. The second followed two years later, and then VMFA rewarded him with grant number three in 2008, with monthly checks for twice the amount he earned while a student.

Last year, Guingon quit his day job and devoted himself full-time to painting. Before the year’s end, he had more invitations (about a dozen) to exhibit than his body of work could accommodate. He had an exhibit last year in Luxembourg and will soon have one in Strasbourg, France. He seems to be developing a European following. Leslie Barnig, owner of Leslie’s Gallery in Luxembourg, discovered Guingon two years ago and quickly arranged to show his work. “This artist offers the viewer a lot of imagination and truth in each painting,” Barnig says. “His military style with cows was something I had never seen before.”