I’m Camille, a commercial artist and marketer with 14 years of professional experience. I’m the founder and creative director of TBC Manila Design House.

I write — from brand strategy to poetry and prose — and I paint, both traditionally and digitally.

Born in a busy corner of Makati City in the early 1990s, I observed how art lived in the daily Filipino psyche. In the minds of the masses, you can’t make money from art. But the bustle of the city told a different (and not very definitive) story. There were jeepney sign painters and mall charcoal portraitists. There was at least one ridiculously talented graffiti maestro for every ten vandal gangsters.

Hardworking artists were respectable, but poor: mentally classed as slightly blue-collar, and not an end goal when you sent your children to school. Art for pure self-expression was also a fascinating thing: in my child’s mind, there was a very thin line between the deranged taong-grasa scribbling obras in the street to somebody’s neighbor’s uncle who had become a successful international exhibitor. Wealth made a difference between these two, but as far as the town gossips are concerned, they were just two different flavors of crazy.

As for myself, art was the only thing I could imagine myself doing, for richer or poorer. Serendipitously, after high school, I won a Multimedia Arts scholarship at the College of St. Benilde in Manila. The course of study supplemented my skills, and most of all, confirmed that, indeed, a creative industry existed, and I could, with effort, survive and thrive in it, armed with just a computer and a few art materials.

So I’m an artist, not just by choice, but by necessity and profession. And I am based in the Philippines, out of a stubborn love for my home archipelago, and a strong suspicion that if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere — here in this land full of otherworldly talent.