Araceli Dans’s 2002 Pink Serenade embodies the best of what her oeuvre can offer. A prolific artist, Dans’s paintings are instantly recognizable with her meticulous attention to detail, particularly with the delicate embroideries that pop out even more with her penchant for depicting her subjects in front of dark backgrounds. In Pink Serenade, her talent for painting the calado, a traditional Philippine open-thread work pattern used in making the barong tagalog, is evident. The black background pushes the attention squarely on the intricately painted fabric and the vibrant pink flowers which are the only pop of color in the otherwise monochromatic piece. Watercolor is notably a hard medium to control; and yet, Dans managed to wield the problematic medium to make the piece look opaque, quite unlike the transparency watercolor offers. Precision and patience went into her depiction of the calado, replicating the lacelike texture with an incredibly meticulous eye. Throughout her illustrious career, Dans sought out ways to find her niche. “..I did not want to be like Amorsolo and so forth. I had to look for myself,” she once said as quoted by a 2024 Lifestyle Inquirer article. “I found myself in still life. Not many people around the world do still life. And I looked for original ways of doing still life. Why does everything have to be on a table? Why always fruits and flowers? Why not rags, objects inside old cartons?" Indeed, her still life stands out, vividly Dans in its intricate details and out-ofthe-box subject matter. (Hannah Valiente)