Artleta

 

Essay 19. ARTLETA

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

The word artleta is a portmanteau. It is a blending of the word art and atleta (athlete). I coined that word to, ahem, describe myself - because aside from art and literature, I'm also into sports. But artleta will better describe Francisco 'Isko' de la Cruz. He'd done feats of physical prowess which I've never done and can never hope to do. Look at what he is wearing in the photo showing him with his artwork. That's one of the many uniforms he wore as participant in several marathons.

But before taking up running, Isko was first a cyclist. He is my cycling and swimming buddy. But unlike me, he's not merely a recreational cyclist. He's hardcore. He belongs to a group of cyclists - supercyclists I call them -  who have biked from Monumento to Sorsogon several times already, which distance took them four days to traverse. Their group have already gone biking to Bagac, Bataan; Jalajala, Rizal; Lucban, Quezon; and Manaoag, Pangasinan. They plan to do Monumento to Leyte next.

The latest proof of Isko's athleticism was when he biked solo the more than 118-km distance from Oslob to the port of Cebu. He spent five days with us in Oslob when we went there for a vacation in March 2018. He had to leave earlier because he had a commitment at home. Isko must have enjoyed immensely his Cebu vacation, especially the bike ride along the scenic Cebu coastline, that he keeps on asking lately when I plan to go back to Oslob. He again wants to tag along.

Isko is from Hagonoy, Bulacan. Although he is ten years younger than me, he was my classmate in Rizal Course at the University of the East School of Music and Fine Arts (UESMFA) in Caloocan. Don't ask me why we became classmates despite our big age gap. It is a long story.

We lost track of each other after I left college in 1985. It was only in 2001 that I again encountered him, in a cocktail party hosted by the Metrobank Foundation during their painting competition's awarding ceremony. We were both pleasantly surprised, not expecting to see the other at the party. But he perhaps hoped to see me there. He must have presumed that since I was one of the two Grand Prize winners of the first Metrobank competition in 1984 (the other being Roberto Feleo), there's a big possibility that I would be among the invitees.

From then on, Isko and I haven't lost contact.. He persuaded me to take up cycling, which I did, and we became companions during the frequent bike rides we love to do to the storied places of Manila and the nearby provinces - like historic churches, ancestral houses of heroes, art galleries and museums, and even cemeteries.

Isko is into t-shirt printing - a business that must be thriving because of its enormous demand on his time. He's been at it for more than two decades now, so I must say that Isko is already an expert in silkscreen techniques or serigraphy.

That's the reason why when the idea of reviving our old UESMFA art group, the SETA Movement, and holding a group art exhibit came up, Isko, who does abstracts before, leaned more towards  using serigraphic techniques in creating his artwork. This is not a novel technique. Although it was Andy Warhol who popularized its usage in the creation of fine paintings, It was Robert Rauschenberg, if I remember correctly, who first employed the technique in his art making.

Here in the Philippines, two guys who've been making waves in both the local and international art scene also use serigraphy in creating their pieces. One is the abstractionist  Max Balatbat: the other, the multi-media visual and performance artist Sam Penaso.

Although Isko hopes to also make his mark in the art scene by using serigraphy, his intent was not do full abstractions in emulation of Max Balatbat. He was inclined more to turn out artworks celebrating the pop art ethos, which is the elevation of the mundane, the popular, the ubiquitous, the current, the high-tech, and the kitschy to high art status.

The artwork he showed at Seta Pilipinas' Renascence exhibit at the Sigwada Art Gallery is titled "Literati". It depicts an intellectual, a reconfiguration of Rodin's "The Thinker" sculpture, reading what looks like an encyclopedia, while holding an umbrella to ward off heavy rain represented by the literal depiction of the idiom 'raining cats and dogs'. True to Isko's pop art intent, this painting contains elements common to many pop art works like cartoonish animal characters, loud colors, and tongue-in-cheek narration.

Isko's three children are all professionals now. That's why he'd ease up a bit on his silk- screen printing business. He confessed that what he aches to do today is create fine paintings using watercolor, and perhaps, when he got the hang of it, to paint using oil a la Vladimir Volegov. And what he has in mind is for us to mix sport and art by bringing our art materials whenever we go biking and paint outdoors. I concurred, but only in principle, because when I go out to bike  or swim or whatever, what I intend to do are precisely only those. No painting, since in addition to writing, that's what I've already been doing day in and day out at home.