Celebrating Celebrations

 

Essay 62. CELEBRATING CELEBRATIONS

By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol 

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."  With that quote, Picasso elevated naif, primitivist, and even "childlike" art, onto a status equal to that enjoyed by Cubism, Fauvism, and other modernist art styles. Pablo Picasso, the pioneer art deconstructivist, was already a master of academic realism when he was in his mid-teens. But at some point in his career, Picasso grew tired of imitating natural appearances and began distorting and deconstructing forms and figures so that his works began to resemble more and more paintings that can easily be done by a child. That's all for the good it seems, because Picasso's radical creative moves liberated painters from the tedious task of copying nature as is, and expanded the definition of artworks that are considered aesthetically pleasing and professionally-done.

AMADOR BARQUILLA's paintings - with the extreme simplification of their faceless human forms, ingenuous stylization of the dome-like hills, and employment of near-flat colors and black outlines - might seem at first glance like the work of a child. But his intricate and bustling composition and masterful combining into a coherent whole of a busy foreground scene with multitudes of people with an equally busy background reveal a well-honed artistic skill and a mature knowledge on how one ought to construct a picture.

Barquilla likes to depict Filipinos at their cheerful best. Barrio fiestas, wedding celebrations, the carnival or "perya", and even the collective effort of relocating a whole house (the "bayanihan") are the staples of his art. Barquilla drew his inspiration from a wellspring of happy memories that date back to his childhood days in the province, where festivities such as these provided the villagers some respite and diversion from their routine tasks of scraping a living from the land and the sea. Very noticeable in Barquilla's works is the frenzy, the frenetic movement of the characters peopling his canvases that one can almost feel their excitement and hyped up mood.

When asked who his favorite local and foreign painters are, Barquilla answered Fernando Amorsolo and Keith Haring. Now, that is perplexing because no two art styles can be more antipodal than those of Amorsolo and Haring. Amorsolo was a staunch proponent of classical realism, while the American graffitist Keith Haring was one of the leading lights of Pop Art. Haring's signature style that shows naked and bloated stick figures in motion outlined in black must have inspired Barquilla to delineate his own figures with black outlines too. But Haring's influence stopped there, in those black outlines, because despite Barquilla's modernist approach in limning his figures, the native Filipino clothing of his characters, the lush coloration, and the rural milieu of his paintings manifested clear and nearer kinship with Amorsolo's bucolic scenes.

Now a resident of Laguna, Barquilla was born in Polangui, Albay to farmer Amador Sr. and Purefication Canalda. He revealed that a cousin, Jerry Morada, taught him the basics of painting. Barquilla had exhibited solo thrice and had joined several group exhibitions here and abroad. Polangui is surely a lovely place - a veritable paradise for a boy growing up. The place is not only idyllic, the people living there were apparently also filled with a "joie de vivre" - a lust for life - that compelled them to make any cyclical and landmark event in their lives a celebration. And that's precisely what Barquilla is doing today - celebrating by means of paint and canvas the celebrations that were an integral part of his happy boyhood days.