Painter of Nature's Bounty

 

Essay 53. PAINTER OF NATURE'S BOUNTY

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol

ERIC MANUEL PRESADO followed his bliss and found full unalloyed satisfaction by selflessly imparting his knowledge of art and art making.  A Special Art teacher for ten years at the Mabini Elementary School in Quiapo, Presado had taught specially-inclined children there the rudiments of drawing and painting.

Presado's advocacy started with his involvement with Imee Marcos's "Super Kulayero (Super Colorers)" movement in the latter half of the 1970s, the goal of which is to encourage artistically-gifted children to help turn drab walls into concrete ''canvases" for colorful murals. The Super Kulayero was actually a spin-off of the 'Kulay Anyo ng Lahi (Color and Form of the Race)' project of the  First Lady Madame Imelda Romualdez Marcos. Participants in her project, which include four future National Artists, had their designs magnified and copied on walls of selected buildings by billboard painters. The Kulay Anyo and the Super Kulayero were the first concerted thrusts to propagate public art in the Philippines, and Presado can say with pride that he was among its ardent and tireless proponents, being one of the mentors of the Super Kulayero kids. 

As an Assistant Professor, and later on Associate Professor, in Fine Arts at the Philippine Women's University (PWU), Presado would take his students on painting excursions to the rural outdoors This was for them to also feel the exhilaration Presado felt everytime he paints "en plein air". The teaching method though at the PWU isn't traditional all the way, because the students were also encouraged to innovate. One result of their search for things novel was when Presado, together with a group of students, came up with a real avant-gardish way of exhibiting their paintings. And that is by flying them - like kites!

Presado, who is adept in the use of various painting mediums, likes watercolor the best. Watercolor can be applied in three ways: like tempera in which white paint is used for the highlights, or like the dry brush method favored by Andrew Wyeth, where he utilized pointed brushes and very little water. The third way, which Presado prefers, is the wash technique, where much water is used to thin the colors. Looser brushwork is also employed in paintings of the watercolor-wash type, where accidental effects like the melding and flowing of the still wet colors into each other are adjudged as aesthetically pleasing. Presado chose well, because his still lifes exhibit that fluidity and spontaneity, not to mention the economy of brush strokes, that art lovers sought and admired most in watercolors.

Presado's favorite subject matter also reveals much about the psyche of a man who considers his boyhood in his native Bicol as one of, if not the happiest phase of his life. Presado paints not only rustic sceneries, but also and more frequently, the bounties of both land and sea - fruits and vegetables, and edible marine creatures like fish and crustaceans - which can be had in the province for free. We can thus identify Presado with those painters who crave to go back, not to the past, but to the places of their boyhood, to savor once more the air and food and to frolic again in the swimming holes that make life there blissful. Painters like Presado are lucky, because even though they can't go back frequently to their hometowns, they can instead make their hometowns go to them by re-creating them and the idyllic memories they evoke through their paintings any time they like.