IN THE STUDIO WITH MARK HIGGINS: MIXING HISTORY WITH FUN AND VIBRANT COLORS
Artist Mark Lewis Higgins’ studio is like a portal into different countries and centuries. Enter one door and you’re in The Last Emperor-era China, with its rich reds, curlicued opium bed and brocaded cloaks.
Behind Door No. 2 is Venice and Istanbul, the walls an azure that evokes the Blue Mosque, a Venetian duke depicted in a Higgins painting above the bed and his peaked hat on a lampstand.
Go to the loo and you are somehow transported to Provence, with lavender blooming on the counter and a French candle scenting the air.
Antiques, curios and books mingle on every available surface, back-dropped by walls tinted in bright primary colors. It’s a heady, opulent mix — one that would be a hot mess in anyone but Higgins’ expert hands.
“I have an allergy to white walls,” he says. “I don’t like seeing white walls anywhere except in the kitchen. I just find it boring. I love the
idea that anywhere you look there’s something to look at, and a story.”
The artist, who’s exhibited in galleries from New York to Manila, authored two books (one about his mother, iconic fashion designer Slim: Salvacion Lim Higgins and the more recent Fashionable Filipinas: An Evolution of the Philippine National Dress in Photographs 18601960), and is a fashion designer himself, filters objects with an eye for the exquisite. For example, chartreuse wouldn’t be most people’s first pick for a living-room wall color, but instead of the visual assault you might expect, Higgins makes it work.
“I was working on the series of paintings that I’d just showed (“Gold In Our Veins” at the Ayala Museum last February), and the inspiration was the ancient history of Southeast Asia, so it was all these references to spices, porcelain and things like that, and I was using the brightest color palette ever,” Mark explains. “I’d never used colors like that. So when I was fixing this apartment, I wanted it to be a reflection of my mind at the time, and this particular yellow-green — I wanted something really happy. Also, because you see the greenery