Best of Both Worlds

 

Essay. 54. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol 

REX O. CELIZ is in an enviable position. That's because he was able to achieve his childhood dream of becoming a painter and at the same time practice a lucrative career as a corporate lawyer. Celiz disclosed that his desire to be an artist never waned when he grew up, but practical consideration made him opt to be a lawyer instead.

Celiz first studied History at the University of the Philippines-Visayas. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree there, he next enrolled at the Ateneo de Manila University where he earned his Juris Doctor degree. He also took advanced studies at the University of San Diego for his Master Of Laws degree 

Bago City is in Negros Occidental, a province in Western Visayas, known for its sprawling sugar cane plantations. Celiz was born there, in 1966. The sights of these plantations and the seasonal routines of the migrant sugarcane workers or "sacadas" cutting ang gathering those sugarcanes in carabao-drawn carts were apparently etched deeply in his memory that Celiz never tires of capturing them again and again on canvas. 

Entirely self-taught, Celiz began painting seriously only in 2014, even though the urge to copy the beauty of nature have always been with him since childhood. By painting seriously, I mean his creating artworks regularly, even if only during his free time, in their bedroom which doubles as his studio. Celiz asserted that he hadn't taken any formal lessons in drawing and painting, and added that everything he knew about art making, especially in the use of acrylic, he learned from the art books he bought at a second-hand bookstore near his office. The books he collected were perhaps books on the art of Fernando Amorsolo, Claude Monet, and Vincent Van Gogh - Celiz's favorite artists. Judging from his choice of Monet and Van Gogh, impressionism must be the style that caught his fancy. Which is true.

Impressionism was originally a derogatory term coined by the art critic Louis Leroy to refer to the paintings of Claude Monet and the others who exhibited with him in 1874. What prompted Leroy to come up with that term was Monet's painting "Impression, sunrise", whose sketchy character greatly offended the art critic's academic taste. Yes, impressionist paintings with their short brush strokes and absence of blending look unfinished, but Celiz was impressed nevertheless with what he calls  "their play with light and color", which he said reflects his "bright and sunny disposition".

But while the French Impressionist painted French scenes and things, Celiz documented sceneries typically Filipino. Instead of painting a row of poplars (or other temperate climate trees) like what Monet did, Celiz painted a banana grove. Instead of reprising Van Gogh's series of purple iris paintings, Celiz painted bandera españolas. Except for his choice of subject matter, Celiz followed and absorbed to the hilt the painting techniques developed by Monet. Celiz's painting of two roosters fighting is the most Monet-like because of the brilliancy of its colors and its thin short and loose daubs of paint which produced a shimmering effect.

The most remarkable though among Celiz's works is his sugarcane harvest scenes which I see as his attempt to approximate Amorsolo's pastoral landscapes. But he deviated somewhat and chose to highlight Negros Occidental's local color in his own sugarcane plantation pastorals. What pleases the eye in Celiz's renditions of this harvest scenes is his utilization of a yellow orange hue to color the plantation grounds that makes the entire scene seem suffused with the golden glow of approaching sunset.