About the Artist

Art has always been a part of my life, but for many years, it wasn’t my only passion. I was physically active, spending my time cycling, playing badminton, and practicing martial arts. Pushing myself physically was second nature, and I thrived in movement. But in 2012, everything changed when I was diagnosed with late adult-onset muscular dystrophy. At first, I tried to ignore it, continuing as I always had, but over time, my body made the decision for me. One by one, the things I loved were taken away—not suddenly, but gradually, until all that remained was my creativity.

I had always drawn, starting as a teenager with portraits copied from magazines and hair dye packaging. My childhood visits to the Philippines, my mother’s homeland, also shaped my artistic perspective, inspiring me to sketch landscapes and cultural scenes. I pursued a National Diploma in 3D Design, but my career took a different path.

I spent years working as a machinist in the steel industry, a physically demanding job that required long 12-hour shifts. Despite the exhaustion, I found ways to keep my creativity alive. I’d take the large shipping labels meant for steel orders and fill them with ideas—words, sketches, poetry—whenever I had a moment to breathe. I’d return home after those long shifts with my pockets full of unfinished thoughts, scribbled onto the very materials of my workday.

In 2016, writing became my main creative outlet. I had always expressed myself through visual art, but words gave me something different—a way to unravel the emotions I didn’t know how to process. At the very end of 2016, at a New Year’s Eve party, I met someone who would inspire much of my poetry. It was an instant connection, but circumstances kept us apart. At the same time, I was trapped in an unhappy relationship and dealing with the reality of my father’s declining health. He had been bed-bound for years following a stroke, and though I had always been close to him, I felt helpless as I watched his condition worsen. Like me, he had muscular dystrophy—it was from him that I inherited it. The weight of everything became overwhelming, and I turned to writing as a way to make sense of it all.

I started posting nearly every day on an anonymous Instagram account, pouring out everything I felt. It was raw, unfiltered, sometimes messy, but it was real. I didn’t write for an audience; I wrote because I needed to. Some of my best ideas weren’t even written at home—they were scrawled onto the backs of shipping labels during long shifts at the factory, between moving heavy steel and hearing the drone of machines.

On April 9, 2017, my father passed away. His loss broke me in a way I still struggle to describe. I had already felt trapped, lost, and emotionally drained, but losing him left a hole in me. I drowned myself in distractions—working long hours, writing constantly, clinging to the past while avoiding the future. Grief blurred into regret. The girl I had met on New Year’s Eve had long since faded from my life, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Writing about her became a way to hold onto something—something that, in my mind, represented a love I had never allowed myself to have.

By the spring of 2017, my words took on a new form. I began transforming my poetry into graffiti, stenciling phrases of love and loss onto the walls of Worthing under the name Rebel Romeo. What started as a deeply personal act became something more, as people began to find and share my work, capturing it in photographs and spreading it online under #RebelRomeo. The physicality of graffiti—cutting stencils, spray painting in the early hours—allowed me to reclaim a sense of movement, even as my condition limited me in other ways.

As my health continued to change, so did my art. I moved toward digital illustration, large-scale mixed media, and experimental textures, incorporating materials from construction into my canvases. Creativity was no longer just an outlet—it became my way of adapting, of continuing to express myself when my body no longer allowed me to in other ways.

Today, my work is an evolving fusion of past and present—drawing, writing, street art, digital media, and tactile mixed-media pieces. This website is an archive of my journey, a collection of thoughts, emotions, and artistic exploration. It’s a reflection of who I was, who I am, and who I am still becoming.