Chronicler of our Past

 

Essay 51. CHRONICLER OF OUR PAST

(The Art of Dan Libor)

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

Cinema advertising, the industry engaged in the production of huge movie billboards or "cartelons", was a field many starting painters from decades ago aspired to break into. It was seen as a somewhat steady source of income, (the proverbial bread and butter) because of the brisk demand then by movie producers and theaters for those hand-painted movie ads. Now a lost art, cinema advertising's seeming demise was caused by the influx of digitally-printed tarpaulins which ad clients must have found cheaper and of a higher quality because of their faithful reproduction of movie images.

Cinema advertising was Dan Libor's stepping stone to a future career as a "serious painter". He started early. He was still a teenager when he was hired as cartelon painter in the early 1960s. His colleagues during those days were the young Ephraim Samson, Loreto Racuya, and Freddie Villanueva - all of which made names for themselves later on as serious painters.

Libor was born on April 26, 1946 in Pasay City. He majored in Painting at the University of Santo Tomas College of Architecture and Fine Arts. After college, he was hired by Ideal Theater as Operation Manager in charge of lobby displays. As such, he was obliged, together with his helpers, not only to conceptualize and paint movie ads, but also to fashion 3-d giant replicas of movie monsters like Orca and King Kong, and also of a rocketship, using wood, abaca, and other materials.

But the demand for hand-painted movie ads began to wane in the 1990s because of what I mentioned before as the influx of digitally- printed tarpaulins. Thus, cartelon painters were forced to seek out other means of livelihood, with the more fortunate and truly talented among them finding their place in the mainstream art scene. 

Among those was Libor, whose favorite subject of turn of the century Philippine genre scenes became his signature theme. He was not the only one who do this. There was of course, Fernando Amorsolo and Amorsolo's uncle Fabian Dela Rosa - and much earlier, Jose Honorato Lozano, Justiniano Asuncion, and Simon Flores. But these painters' genre scenes depict people contemporaneous with them. Unlike Libor, they didn't paint scenes of everyday life from the era before them 

We can see from Libor's body of works his fascination with the past. His art parallels that of Bencab, whose Larawan series was also a harking back to the past. But while Bencab used as references vintage photographs of real Filipinas garbed in baro't saya, Libor's images were drawn without referring to any photograph whatsoever. The people he drew were his own "inventions". Another difference between the paintings of Libor and those of Bencab is their palette or color scheme. Bencab's art has pop traits. He painted his backgrounds almost flat and in pastelly shades of blue, tangerine, violet, and pink. Libor avoids using those colors in their full intensity. He leans more towards subtle tonalities and subdued colorations. 

Libor loves painting crowd scenes. Scenes depicting dozens of people are the most difficult to compose and render. But Libor proved himself up to the challenge. Market and fish harvesting scenes were the staples of his art. He also gathered in a few paintings persons from different Philippine ethnic tribes. Libor's consistent portrayal of happenings from an era long gone attest to his aspiration to document and chronicle images and events from our storied past. Libor had found his niche. Art lovers of the present and of generations yet to come will see him as belonging to that illustrious group of Filipino painters - which includes no less than the National Artists Amorsolo and Bencab - who purveyed nostalgia as theme of their art.