After a hiatus of more than three decades, Edwin Diamante has returned to his first love. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Diamante was one of a handful of Philippine surrealists—along with the likes of the late Roberto Villanueva and Ricardo Lacsamana—whose dreamscapes of idyllic nature posited against the ravaging effects of mass culture and technology attracted the positive attention of art critics.

Practical considerations forced Diamante to postpone his art-making.

Diamante has returned to painting. His works are fraught with spiritual meaning. Otherworldly vistas represent eternal but parallel realities which are there for all to realize once the blinders of tradition and bourgeois conventions have been peeled away.

“Creation” illustrates a couple emerging into human freedom from their stony cocoon. Otherwise entitled “Mag-Asawang Bato,” the painting reflects Diamante’s view of life as continuous travel, from one stage of consciousness to another.

“Departure” likewise depicts the evolutionary dance of new souls coming to populate and old souls leaving the earth.

“The Witness” gives expression to his belief that we ourselves are witnesses to the karmic effects of our choices and actions. Will, wisdom and love are the three points of the pyramid that comprise our existence. Sometimes, in our ignorance, we throw the dice choosing to gamble, but for better or for worse, we inevitably reap what we sow and we see the consequences in our lives.

Diamante paints spontaneously. He approaches the canvas with brush in hand and an idea in mind. As he proceeds, the work sometimes transforms into something completely unplanned. Acquiescent to the flow of the spirit, it is only later in the process that he comprehends the message that wants to be delivered. “I am an audience to my own works. They don’t always come out the way that I intended. Sometimes I hardly believe that I created this work.” But as long as it comes from his heart, Diamante knows that it is real. For it is the heart that is the wellspring of truth and good, Diamante propounds. Evil—or whatever diverts one from feeling and from being in the moment—comes from thought. Thought is a product of past experiences and it corrupts the present. “The heart feels,” Diamante says, “and everything it does is true.”

Diamante derives his inspiration primarily from nature. “When I go to the mountains, I feel energy, I see beauty, I feel the moment. When you’re on top of the mountain, you see the wholeness of things. You do not focus on decay or waste. There is no ugliness, only beauty. It is in nature where I encounter God.”

Diamante’s perspective is a pantheistic one, where God and the universe and its various phenomena are one. It is this divine oneness that Diamante aims to reveal.

In “Maskara,” Diamante incorporates his simultaneous perspective of the macro and microcosms. Nature, he submits, has life, has feeling. “It is part of you but you don’t recognize it. The truth is masked from you because you only see the obvious; you don’t feel the truth. But God is with you. The Divine is inside you. The problem is we’re all like bubbles in an ocean. Our bubble-egos encapsulate us and conceal the vastness of God. We create our own identities, fight for it, die for it. But our identity is not our essence. Once the bubbles burst, we become part of the ocean.”