October 16, 2025 – Philippine Artists Network for Community Integrative Transformation (PANCIT) in Vancouver was formed on the premise that visual arts can convey a concept, a feeling, an idea which may be difficult to express in words or in actions.
PANCIT offers free summer camp workshops for teens and adults. Its workshop activities include still life painting, portrait sketching, canvas making and painting, mural painting, bamboo stick painting, and banner lettering and painting.
After the Lapulapu Day tragedy on April 26, PANCIT organized an art workshop for healing along with other arts groups. Titled “ Healing Colours,” its purpose was to organize help for the victims and those affected by the tragedy. This PANCIT workshop has 12 participants, including Marina Hamoy and Erie Maestro who shared the attached poster with CFNet. The poster shows the artists working on their murals. Marina and Erie’s murals, although still unfinished, showed beautiful color combinations. They hoped to finish them for the PANCIT art exhibit later this month.
This particular PANCIT visual arts workshop and interactive mural painting production is facilitated by Filipino-Canadian muralist and art educator Bert Monterona, and organized by MIGRANTE BC.
This workshop involved lessons on basic techniques in art including drawing, colors and shading, and other elements. But the focused was on art for trauma healing in order “to take our minds off the trauma and put them in the artwork and see themselves in the art.”
PANCIT has put together a number of murals for an art exhibit titled “Healing Colours” to open on October 24 at the Sunset Community Centre on 6810 Main Street in Vancouver. The colourful murals will be on public display until November 7, 2025.
Editor of Canadian Filipino Net
Eleonor R. Laquian has written four bestselling books and co-authored four others with her husband, Prod Laquian. Over ten years, she served in various capacities at the University of British Columbia’s Institute of Asian Research: as manager of administration and programs, editor and chair of the publications committee, and primary researcher of its Asian Immigration to Canada project.
She did her BA degree in journalism at Maryknoll College in the Philippines, a master’s degree in public administration at the University of the Philippines, and postgraduate studies at the School of Public Communications at Boston University in the US.
Before immigrating to Canada, she worked with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the UN Information Center. She was a researcher and bureau manager of The New York Times in Beijing, China from 1984 to 1990. She was the first and only Filipino to conduct a nationwide survey of Filipinos in Canada, in 1972, for her master’s thesis at UP. It was published as A Study of Filipino Immigrants in Canada, 1952–1972.
She updated the survey in 2005 for a book, co-authored with her husband Prod: Seeking a Better Life Abroad: A Study of Filipinos in Canada, 1957–2007,published by Anvil Publishing in Manila. She and Prod have visited over a hundred countries for work and pleasure. They immigrated to Canada in 1969.
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