Subtlety and Restraint

Essay 1. SUBTLETY AND RESTRAINT 

I've created a blog titled "Kasining Essays by Arnaldo de Tondo". The content of this blog are my write-ups about fellow artists. Not art criticism: just write-ups. There's a difference between the two. 

The  first essay - written in 2011, if I remember the year correctly - is about Isagani Fuentes. Why him? Well, that's because he was the one who encouraged me to try my hand in writing about art and artists. A good idea, I thought. That would give me the chance to put to practical use the knowledge I've accumulated from years of reading.

I am not really a writer. Oh, perhaps I am. But I'm just an amateur. I am a visual artist, a painter. A professional one I can say because I earn my living painting. If there are self-taught painters - which I'm not because I took up Fine Arts in college - there are also self-taught writers. I am one of them. I didn't study journalism nor majored in English. Everything I know about writing I learned just by voracious reading.

SUBTLETY AND RESTRAINT

(Notes on Isagani Fuentes's Unearthed Series)

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol 

Isagani Fuentes and I are not old friends. We only met at Facebook---he added me and I confirmed. Readily, for I saw at once that he is a kindred spirit: a fellow artist intent on pursuing his muse. But I was surprised upon learning that he was not even a fine arts student in college. He is a commerce graduate who now teaches full-time in an elementary school in Marikina. 

It seems that Gani is one of those with inborn artistic talents, who were forced, perhaps because of economic necessity, or perhaps because their parents looked with disdain on painting as a profession, to take up a more practical and probably more lucrative course. 

Now, Gani talks of leaving teaching for good to paint full-time. I, acting like a concerned parent, dissuaded him, telling him that it would become difficult for him to make both ends meet if he will rely solely on the sales of his paintings. Although his wife is also a teacher, her salary I presume would be barely enough to put their two grade-schooler kids to college and maintain at the same time their current lifestyle. I suggested that the best thing for him to do would be to just take a one year leave from teaching. That way, he can devote all his time to painting, while still retaining the option, if things don't turned out as he'd expected, to go back to a career paying a regular salary. 

I am now taking a respite from writing about myself and my art to write about Gani's, particularly his series depicting pre-hispanic jars dug up (unearthed) by archaeologists.

I was instantly fascinated when I saw his paintings because they are so different from mine. I usually turned out colorful artworks, so, I find Gani's chromatic restraint remarkable and refreshing. Gani's use of subdued color schemes reveals his mature artistic sensibility and innate flair for design. His watercolors of jars combined two extreme techniques in twentieth century painting - Andrew Wyeth`s sharp focus realism and Piet Mondrian`s hard-edged abstraction. 

While Gani rendered his jars with near photographic precision, he just painted his gridded backgrounds flat, with no illusion of depth or perspective, whatsoever. Such penchant for flatness reminded me of the paintings of Arturo Luz. Luz would have been floored by Gani's paintings. He would have exhibited them with alacrity in his gallery, if it is still open today. With their clean lines and grids, and the zen-like aura they project, Luz, I'm sure can't help but be fascinated, too. 

Gani was not the first to come up with this type of painting. I remember Nikulas Lebajo's series of exhibitions at the Luz Gallery several years ago, where he showed paintings depicting bottles and jars arranged all in a row and one row on top of another. But the similarity between Gani`s and Nikulas's art ends there, in their composition format, because the latter's paintings, with their pared down images, leaned more towards abstraction, while Gani's still retained traces of the sharp focus realism espoused by Wyeth.

Gani may have derived his iconography from Nikulas Lebajo, but it may have been inadvertent. But even if he did some conscious borrowing, let us not take that against Gani for he was not the first artist to have done so. Painters have been doing it for centuries. Even the ever-inventive and supposedly original Picasso admitted to being influenced by primitive African sculptures when he painted his landmark work, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". And Nikulas, for his part, may have gotten the idea for his jar paintings from an ad for Dos Equis Beer. The art for that ad which I saw in Playboy Magazine, bore an uncanny resemblance to Nikulas Lebajo's paintings. But then, of course, the derivation may also be inadvertent.

Anyway, as a parting note, let me say that Isagani Fuentes is one artist who`s worth one's while to watch. His paintings are palpable proofs that inherent artistic talent can't be bottled up forever. It will find a way, slowly and surely, to blaze up and, in his case, to show to all and sundry that in art making, subtlety and restraint do have their charms.