MANILA, Philippines – There is a spring to the walk of Roger Tibon that matches his calm, ever-smiling demeanor.

Tibon, 47, who answers to the name of Rishab (a Hindu saint), has gone far from the years when he was airbrushing jeepneys in Novaliches, Quezon City, and designing and selling T-shirts to shops along C. M. Recto Ave. in Manila.

Today, he is a painter of women and nature and a martial arts practitioner. His avocation is composing songs and poems. His fifth solo show just ended at the CafÈ by the Ruins in Baguio City.

His works in oil, acrylic or mixed media have a streak of what he calls “mild surrealism” that is easy on the viewer’s eyes. Apart from ferns, seashells, lilies and butterflies, he puts in timepieces and Cordillera symbols. These elements are a fusion of his experiences, dreams and artistic influences like Salvador Dali, Gustav Klimt and Joan Miro.

Born in Tangalan, Aklan, less than an hour’s drive from Kalibo, Rishab moved at age 6 years with his itinerant family to Quezon City, Malolos in Bulacan, then to Manila. He supplemented the income of his father, a carpenter, and mother, a parttime seamstress, by making billboards and streamers in high school. After graduation, he studied to be an automotive diesel mechanic, but his heart was not in it.

Following a successful T-shirt business, he packed his bags to move to Cebu to set up a T-shirt shop and accept illustration jobs from advertising agencies. He became an art director of then Olbes, Ogilvy & Mather agency’s Cebu office.

In the southern island, he added to his knowledge of karate and judo the sport of arnis. He went out of his way to seek arnis grandmasters from Pangasinan and Manila and persisted till he became their assistant instructor.

“Anyone can learn arnis,” he says. “The movements are everyday movements. They are effective and wholistic. You do not even have to hold a stick or any object. An empty hand is enough.”

In 1994, friends from Baguio asked him up. By then, he had roamed Metro Manila, which he grew tired of, the Visayas and Mindanao.

The next year, he joined the Baguio Arts Festival where he met Bencab, but it wasn’t until 1996 when the older artist learned that Rishab knew arnis and asked for private lessons. It was the start of a friendship with Bencab encouraging him to go full-time into painting.

With Baguio’s cool weather and simple lifestyle anchoring him, Rishab continues to paint glowing women, “the light coming from the soul,” he says. He has been a vegetarian for years, does not smoke, drink or do drugs, and studies spiritual writings. His children are named Harinam and Pradyumna.

If the impression Rishab gives is of a super-straight guy, in his art he is drawn to the “unconventional, to things that have a little twist.”