Gatieh Nacario hasn't always thought of himself as an artist. Sure, he's always loved the arts and even taught it to elementary school students at one point, but he never once considered the possibility of becoming an artist himself.
Part of that was due to a lack of confidence in his abilities because he never went to school for the visual arts. Realistically though, Nacario says there just weren't very many options for artists in the Philippines.
"I know I love the visual arts and performing arts, but in the Philippines, there was just not a lot of opportunities," he says. "I had my career as an educator, so I needed to focus on that."
Then everything changed for Nacario when he moved from the Philippines to Spokane in 2019 and threw himself into the city's arts scene.
While Nacario eventually took on his current role as director of Hope House Shelter, the downtown women's shelter operated by Volunteers of America, delays getting his U.S. work visa initially slowed his job hunt.
In the meantime, he explored Spokane's art scene, which is when he discovered the Garland District's Art Alley filled with murals. He posted about the murals on Instagram (@itsgatiehbeart), tagging the business district's president, Julie Shepard-Hall, which prompted her to reach out to correct an error in the post.
Of course Nacario fixed the mistake, but he also took the moment that fate had handed him to connect with Shepard-Hall and set in motion his first mural, "Butterfly Garden." Nacario's aptly named work transformed a section of a wooden fence in the alley south of Garland, between Monroe and Post Streets, into a menagerie of brightly colored flowers and beautiful butterflies.
Soon after, Shepard-Hall contacted him about another local event, the Garland Summer Market, asking if he had any art he'd like to display publicly. Other than his recent mural, however, he had none — but he didn't tell Shepard-Hall that. Instead, he spent the two weeks leading up to the event creating six paintings.
Nacario's rise to local notoriety was quick. By 2022, just three years after moving here, he was nominated for a Spokane Arts Award for his captivating imagination.
That same year, he decided to quit making art after an epiphany about his art style.
"I experimented a lot in different styles, and I felt like [my art] was everywhere," he says, "but I didn't have a unique brand, so I just quit."
This art hiatus didn't last long, though. A year later, Nacario was making art in a new style that he calls stained glass illusion. Basically, he takes qualities of stained glass, like its vivid colors and jagged, puzzle-piece look, and incorporates them into an acrylic painting.
On an artistic level, Nacario was drawn to the geometric style for its simplicity and how easy it was to adapt and experiment with.
"For me, it was just plain colors, like red and blue, and then I just divided it with black," he says. "But when I started working on a larger canvas, I realized that it's not as impressive for me. So I started to blend color and just experiment on how to make it more interesting and it evolved."
Additionally, the style took on a cultural meaning for Nacario, who grew up in a firmly Catholic part of the Philippines, known for its century-old churches filled with stained glass artwork. Much of his work also pulls from specific stories within Filipino culture.
For example, a piece he created for a show at New Moon Art Gallery represents the story of Malakas "The Strong One" and Maganda "The Beautiful One" — basically the Filipino version of Adam and Eve — as they sprouted from a bamboo shoot.
Even though people showed appreciation for Nacario's Filipino art, he says it was hard to actually sell it.
"People loved it, but they didn't want it," he says. "They love the idea and the story behind it, but there's not much people saying, 'Oh, I want to buy that.'"
To address that struggle, Nacario began to incorporate parts of his new home, Spokane, into his works. He painted "The City of Spokane," incorporating popular landmarks like Riverfront Park's Pavilion and Clock Tower, and a collection of lilacs.
While Nacario's journey as an artist started with a mural, all of his stained glass illusion work existed solely on canvas for more than a year. But recently, that's changed.
At the end of May, Nacario completed a new mural on a brick wall near Corbin Park in Spokane's Emerson Garfield neighborhood, which took him about six weeks to complete. By painting some of the bricks bright yellow around the border, he created an illusion — as if the mural's center had been knocked out to see the view beyond it — which he filled with regional landmarks and scenery.
"I was so inspired with this mural," he says with a smile. "When I showed it off to everyone, they all loved it." ♦
