A stillness lingers in Starfish Funeral, one of Arli Pagaduan’s most personal works. Swirls of blue and green suggest ocean currents and fading light. The painting was inspired by a moment in Cape Kannon, Japan, where she found a dead starfish in a parking lot, far from the sea. She paired it with a story about a child mourning the creature, turning the image into a meditation on grief and resilience. “If we want to be honest in storytelling, we must not shy away from embracing sadness,” she says.
I first encountered Pagaduan’s work through paintings by children’s book illustrators. Among the pieces I own is Heart Like a Pond. With its soft ripples and subdued palette, the painting draws focus to what is often overlooked. It reflects her ability to give still moments emotional weight.
For Pagaduan, writing and painting are both ways of telling a story. “I resonate a lot with being a storyteller,” she shares. “I don’t want to be limited to one medium. Some stories ask to be written. Others need to be drawn.” Her creative path began with books. As a quiet, introspective child, she often found comfort in reading—an early connection to narrative that still shapes her work.
She has published Seedlings: A Short Story Collection (2017), Though She is Weak (2019), I Wrote This To Remind You That… (2020), The Things We’re Afraid to Say (2021), I Like It Here in the Interim (2022), and Carmel’s Hands (2025), a historical novel that received Honorable Mention in the PBBY-Salanga Chapter Book Prize. As an illustrator, she has worked on I Miss My Friends by Dawn Lanuza, Helen by Eunice Alcala-Briones, and Where is Bunny Boo? by Anly Kang Hsu. Her upcoming comic Cat Cafeteria, to be published by Komiket, follows a daughter and her mother caring for neighborhood cats.
Early 2025, Pagaduan attended the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France as a Creative Nation Grantee of the National Book Development Board. She also recently spoke at the Young Writers Conference at the National Library this June. Her ongoing involvement in Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan, where Starfish Funeral debuted at Art in the Park 2023, reflects her commitment to creative communities.
Her influences include writers Madeleine L’Engle, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and artists Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, and Taniuchi Rokuro. “Music plays a big role when I create visual work,” she adds, noting how rhythm and tone shape her process.
Pagaduan’s art is rooted in small, attentive observations: a ripple on water, a starfish out of place, a fleeting gesture. Heart Like a Pond, now in my collection, continues to hold space without demanding it. Her work doesn’t seek spectacle. It stays with you because it listens, and waits.
