Non Finito Dreams

 

Essay 52.  NON FINITO DREAMS

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

Last June 12, I and my cycling buddy Isko Dela Cruz carried out the first of our artist studio visits to the place of sculptor/painter HENRY BRAULIO in Sucat, Parañaque. I dubbed this on-bike visits, rather facetiously at first, as our 'Lakwatsang Pintor". It was a long ride -  for me at least. But not for Isko because he is what I call a "super cyclist" - a veteran of many bike rides to Bicol and other true distant places.

Henry is a freelance sculptor working for the House of Precast, the pioneer and leader in the field of decorative concrete art in the Philippines. The House of Precast has a long history going back to 1950, the year it was founded. The company specializes in manufacturing made to order sculptures, and other architectural and garden ornamentations.

Henry was born in Lamitan, Basilan on November 15, 1963, to Federico Concepcion Braulio and Pacita Estrella Apiado. He was the youngest of six. Henry had three brothers and two sisters and he recalls that at least five of them, including himself, were artistically inclined. Henry said that they apparently took after their public school teacher mother who was good in drawing. Like most future practicing artists, Henry began drawing during his elementary school years. He relates that he was often pulled out from his classes by teachers who wanted him to draw on the blackboard visual aids like maps and body parts for the Social Studies and Science subjects respectively.

After graduating from high school in Zamboanga City, Henry joined the Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, more commonly known as the Claretian Missionaries, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he earned his degree in AB Philosophy in 1984. After his one year Novitiate in Zamboanga City, Henry went on to take his Theology studies at the Loyola School of Theology at the Ateneo de Manila University from 1985 to 1987. Henry disclosed that he only completed two of the four years required to finish the Theology course, because when he went on sabbatical, he decided not to return to the seminary anymore.

I met Henry at the Galeria delas Islas in 1986, while he was still in the midst of his Theology studies, when he and Tana Madrigal (an heir to the the Madrigal's Alabang property and fortune) enrolled in the workshop I organized for the gallery. Henry showed me a sample of his work, a charcoal portrait of Pope John Paul II, if I remember correctly. I saw then and there his special gift and worried that I no longer have anything to teach him.

When Henry left the seminary, Tana proposed that he worked for them, in the residence of Antonio Paterno Madrigal in New Manila, where his duty was to paint whatever Tana and her mother asked him to paint and retouch works by the old Filipino masters. He worked in that house for a year, after which Tana transferred him to the Madrigal Art Center to work as in-house artist. The scope of his job there was quite wide, and included among others, looking for and inviting artists to exhibit in their gallery, setting up exhibitions, and facilitating art workshops. He was also the gallery's official photographer.

More of a sculptor now than he is a painter, Henry's fascination with stone sculpture was ignited by chance. That happened while he was having his paintings framed at the shop of Mario Patdu (who was my classmate in Fine Arts at UST) in preparation for his solo exhibit at the Madrigal Art Center. The road in front of Mario's house was being repaired at that time, and Henry spotted there chunks of stones, or "escombro", scattered among the rubble of the broken road. Henry took three of them to the Madrigal Art Center intending to use them as accents for the silver jewelry from Baguio they sell at their small museum shop. 

One afternoon, with nothing else to do, Henry brought out his woodcarving tools and start to carve  mother and child images out of two of the stones. Satisfied with what he did, Henry placed his two small carvings back on the display panel of the museum. Henry averred  that he did that "just for fun", that's why he was surprised when it got the attention of a New Zealander who bought the two carvings outright. This woman was Henry's former student in drawing, and out of gratitude to her for her appreciation of his creations, and perhaps because he was also thrilled that someone would so love artworks he just did on impulse, Henry let those two pieces go for the measly sum of 150 pesos.

That episode was Henry's epiphany. It pointed to him the path he should tread on his art journey, and that was to focus all the creative powers he has to liberating the figures his penetrating eyes and imagination see trapped in stones. Thus, from then on, the exhibits Henry mounted were exhibits of stone sculptures, one time solo and many times with Rey Paz Contreras's group Daambakal Sculptures. After honing his stone carving skill to a still higher level, Henry mustered enough courage to apply for a sculptor's job in Taiwan. He was accepted, and he stayed there for three years, from 1993 to 1996.

The Madrigals, seeing how serious Henry was with his sculpture work, sent him to Florence on a scholarship, where he enrolled for a one-year course in Classical Sculpture at the Florence Academy of Arts. That was from September 2009 to September 2010. The training he got there was a rigorous one. The instructor in Life Drawing was not easy to please, and would often find the littlest inaccuracies in Henry's pencil rendition of the models who Henry said couldn't actually hold their original pose and would often move. But all those nitpickings turned out for the good, because the final highly-polished charcoal drawings Henry submitted at the end of the term received no doubt the highest marks.

A few years after his Florence sojourn, in 2014, Henry was hired by the House of Precast as subcontractor for figurative sculptures - like giant statues of Mary and Jesus, angels, saints, and many more. When we visited him in his residence cum workshop in Sucat, a work we saw in progress there was a sculpture of Padre Pio. Henry considered his job with the House of Precast as his bread and butter because aside from being amply paid, commissioned projects from them keep on coming. But deep within, what he really aches to do is create a series of "non finito" sculptures - works that seem unfinished at first glance - to which he would proudly affix his signature because he considers works such as these as his real art, his brand. Rightly so, because the pictures I saw of the non-finito sculptures he did in the past display traits that are both outstandingly classical and modern, a seamless blend  I must say of realism and abstraction.