A Man Adept with Chisel and Brush

 

A MAN ADEPT WITH CHISEL AND BRUSH

by Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol 

MOYO MONTES is a native of Paete, Laguna. He grew up there in the midst of craftsmen who earn their living by producing and selling woodcarved images of farmers, fishermen, vendors, and saints. Paeteños, like the Igorots of the Cordilleras, and the Kapampangans of Betis, Pampanga are renowned for their woodcarving skills. Paeteños though stand out distinct and original  because of the "taka", a handicraft item also being produced and sold in their town. Takas are those red-colored papier-mache figures of horses which I saw being sold years ago at the Tondo town plaza during fiestas.

Moyo's parents, Benjamin and Belen,  operate a woodcraft shop and store, where he learned the rudiments of woodcarving. But Moyo went beyond that, being innately artistic. He taught himself drawing and maybe even painting. Inspired perhaps by those illustrious artist sons of Paete, Manny Baldemor and his cousin Fred (Moyo's brother-in-law), Moyo enrolled in Fine Arts at The University of the East (UE). Moyo's advanced artistic skill was already evident during the early years of his schooling, because he won First Place in the Mexican Embassy Painting Contest in 1982. He was a prolific prize winner because he won the next year an Honorable Mention award in the Christmas Card Design contest and placed first again in the on-the-spot painting competition held  to commemorate the UE School of Fine Arts 19th Foundation Anniversary.

Like many Fine Arts students I know, Moyo failed to complete his course, because of unit deficiencies on his part in ROTC (Reserved Officers Training Course). It didn't matter anyway because a job was waiting for him when he left college, and that was as an assistant of his brother-in-law, the sculptor Fred Baldemor. Fred's sculpture career is lucrative. He specialized during that time in ivory sculpture, which Moyo told me were all bought wholesale  by Imelda Marcos. (incidentally, Fred's house and workshop is in Pasig, the city where Moyo and wife Marissa live with their two children, Carlos and Charize).

Today, aside from being one of the founding members of SETA, Moyo is also a member of PASPI and Grupo Kwadro, two groups currently active in the art scene, whose members are all accomplished portraitist. They are not portraitists who copy from pictures, but those who met regularly for sketching and painting models on the spot. His being accepted into those groups attest to Moyo's mastery of classical realist techniques. 

That's probably the reason why Moyo has shifted to doing abstracts, which he had shown recently in his first solo art exhibit. He must have felt that he'd already exhausted the possibilities of realism. I presume that he intends the abstracts he creates to be non-objective or non-figurative abstractions. But a perceptive friend of mine, Cita Entila, observed that the bluish-grey strips that were strewn haphazardly on one of his canvases resemble knife or even sword blades. I agree - on that one. But I see something else when he changes colors. I seem to see collages of cut strips of paper and even the wood chips and shavings that were the waste products of wood carvings. I deduce that what Moyo is trying to relive perhaps were episodes from his distant past as a gradeschooler creating artworks using cut strips of multi-colored glossy art papers and also from his recent past as a woodcarver in Paete who continued a tradition that earned for the town the label "woodcarving capital of the Philippines".