A Tale of Two Painting Majors

Essay 25. A TALE OF TWO PAINTING MAJORS

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

My very first friend in college is Antonio Tejado. College was the University of Santo Tomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts (USTCAFA), which was then sharing a building with the College of Engineering. On the first day of class, during our first subject, Tony, who came earlier, was already seated at the back of the room. I sat on the vacant chair beside him.

I don't remember what subject we were attending then, but I remember that the teacher asked us to write our name on a one-fourth sheet of pad paper and submit it to her afterwards. I came unprepared. I don't have pad paper with me. I only came with my ballpen. So I requested Tony to please share with me part of his paper, which he did. After class, at noon, we went out and took our lunch together in an eatery along España Street. We became close friends from that day on.

Tony and I both majored in Painting, a choice which dismayed my elder sister, because according to her, the Painting course is "pang-mayaman lang (only for the rich)". An observation so obviously true, because the rich will still eat even if they don't sell a single painting. But I was adamant, and insisted on enrolling, not in the more practical courses like Advertising or Interior Decoration, but in Painting.

Tony is from Oton, Iloilo. He came here to Manila to study at UST. He stayed with a married sister at a house on Instruccion Street in Sampaloc. Tony was a diligent student. He walked the straight path so to speak: never bummed around like I did. The money spent by his parents for his education was not wasted because he graduated on time, and later on earned his masteral and doctorate degrees from the Carlos Hilado Memorial State College while teaching full-time at La Consolation College (LCC) in Bacolod.

Tony went back to Iloilo in 1977, after graduation. In May of the same year Tony visited Bacolod with a cousin and there learned that La Consolacion College also has a Fine Arts Department. Tony went to the Arfien (Architecture-Fine Arts-Engineering) office to apply for a teaching job and was promptly accepted. But he flew again to Manila to rethink his options some more. His stay here though was very brief, less than a month, because by early June, the Dean called and instructed him to go back to Bacolod to join the LCC Faculty.

Tony taught at LCC for 43 years, from 1977 up to 2020, first at its Fine Arts Department and later on when he retired, at its Senior High School Department. That was a long and fruitful academic stint for Tony---not only because he earned his doctorate while teaching there and reached the posts of Fine Arts Department and  Program Head---but also because he was commissioned by the school to execute murals and stained glass designs for its Mendiola and Bacolod campuses.

We saw each other only intermittently during those times. Tony would call and ask me to see him each time he was in Manila on some official 'errand' for LCC. Tony, you see, was their school's representative to conferences and events organized by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts on whose board he served as member for several years. Over bottles of beer and tasty 'pulutan' at different restaurants, Tony and I would reminisce about our college days.

Sometime in 2002, Tony invited me to give a talk on the art of Illustration to the Fine Arts students of LCC. Tony facilitated that, and secure for me a generous fee which also covered the plane fare, food, and hotel accommodations. But I didn't check into any hotel. Why should I when Tony invited me to spend the night in his beautiful house and bond once more over bottles of wine and good food which he himself prepared?

It was my first time to speak in an auditorium before an audience that big. I was very nervous. But when I asked the students if I can speak in Tagalog, and they answered, "Opo! (Yes sir)" in unison, all the butterflies in my stomach flew away. 

I never knew that giving such talks can be fun. The students listened intently, and when time came for the open forum, they plied me with questions one after the other. After the talk they gathered closely around me to ask some more questions about the artworks I brought with me.

The LCC Fine Arts teachers who attended the talk congratulated me profusely, and told me that the talk I gave was more informative and engaging than those given by speakers before me. I was very flattered of course and thankful. The teachers I remember present during the talk, aside from Tony, were Sirs Bamboo Tonogbanua and Roy Aguilar, and Ma'am Mean Manganti. Thank you guys, for the hospitality, especially to Roy who treated me to lunch, and to Sir Bamboo who invited me to his house cum gallery and fashion salon to see his miniature Christmas Village display. But the biggest thanks of course I extend to Tony.

I left USTCAFA in 1975 after our second year in college. We've already finished the subjects Painting 1 and 2 and Composition. I won't mention the name of our teacher in Painting 1. I'll just say that he was the fellow who plays his violin while we his students were busy finishing our plates, to inspire us perhaps in our creative endeavour.

But what a caustic critic he was! The first painting I did was of a mosque at night, which because nocturnal was almost all blue in color. He remarked that my painting was very elementary. Another classmate, Jun Diaz, painted a landscape depicting a bridge over the river. On the bank of the river were brownish and yellow ochre rocks, which according to that professor looked like big fecal matters. 

Our teacher in Composition was Mr. Wenceslao Garcia. It was with him that Tony encountered a little difficulty. For our final plate, Mr. Garcia required us to paint as subject matter a scene from a Filipino myth. I did a scene from the story of Bantugan which easily passed muster. Tony depicted a scene from a Filipino legend whose title I already forgot. Tony's painting was audacious, a la Michelangelo, showing the male hero naked with his male paraphernalia in full display. 

When Mr. Garcia saw Tony's work, he blew his top and declared the work obscene. A most unfair judgement I must say, because the great Michelangelo's frescoes teeming with naked males and females were painted right inside a church and a chapel. And mind you, those nudes were not characters from some obscure myth and legend, but were the patriarchs, prophets, and saints from the Holy Bible itself! 

What I admired most about Tony's works then were his landscapes, particularly the moonlit night scene he did of a boat being rowed down a river. That was the last of Tony's paintings I saw before I dropped out of my Fine Arts course. A very conservative work, Tony must have painted it with the paintings of Fernando Amorsolo, and also perhaps of Cesar Buenaventura and Diosdado Lorenzo, in mind.

Thus, I was very much surprised when I saw the works Tony exhibited in a hotel gallery right after graduation. The works were modern works, very much pared down, and somewhat reminiscent of the quasi-cubist paintings of our teacher, Mr. Angelito Antonio. Tony must have dropped his conservatism during his last two years in college and have been inspired by the modernist figuration of teachers like Mr. Antonio and Mr. Cenon Rivera.

I think it was Mr. Rivera who influenced Tony the most, because the human figures, or should I say the angelic or divine figures, in his later paintings as a professional were almost always outlined with some dark color, like stained-glass art. Mr. Rivera's artworks are like that, heavily outlined, and very much simplified. But there's still a big difference, because while Tony's paintings still retain painterly brushworks and flourishes, Mr. Rivera's paintings have flat colors in the manner of Piet Mondrian and his De Stijl confreres.

Tony also followed a career-path similar to Mr. Rivera who early in his career designed, and perhaps executed by his own hand, several stained-glass windows. Tony had also done that, although the glass in his windows were no longer real glass but resins.

I'm saying now that I liked Tony's modernist works better than the Amorsoloesque paintings he did as a student, because I myself have been trying hard to wean myself away from the sharp-focus realism that was my sole  style before 2008. But no stained-glass style art a la Cenon Rivera for me. I have no soft spot for him. I won't admire his works no matter how good they are. Why?, you ask. That's because he flunked me in his Art History class, despite my having a grade of 1.5 after our mid-term exams. His reason: I exceeded the maximum number of absences allowed each student per semester.

You can gather from what I just revealed the big difference in attitude and mindset between myself and Tony. He attended classes diligently. I bummed around. No need to wonder therefore why he is a PhD and I was a dropout.