KASINING ESSAYS by Arnaldo de Tondo

  AN ERSTWHILE RECLUSIVE ARTIST By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  BODETTE MARASIGAN had joined only one  art exhibit since he left college in 1984. That was early this year, when he and some members of the UE Artists Guild held a group show at the Hounds and Grounds Cafe. Reason for that is Bodette wasn't really keen on exhibiting his works in a gallery setting. He confided that he's not really the sociable type who relish mingling with people, artists or not, during art exhibit cocktail receptions. But that was then. Now, since associating with fellow artists who see art exhibitions not as mere social events but as one sure way of getting exposure in the art scene, Bodette has no choice. He has to chuck off his reclusive persona and introverted ways and mingle with fellow art enthusiasts in an event where canapés and cocktails are ingested in between conversions. Bodette was born in Manila to Miguel Marasigan and Militina delos Reyes. He enrolled in Fine Arts major in Advertis...

  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 b...

  Essay 66. ALL ABOUT BERT  We have in college, at the University of the East School of Music and Fine Arts, an art group which we named SETA (Self-expression Through Art). Our group held its first exhibit at the Galeria delas Islas in 1985. We revived that art group in 2011, this time as SETA Pilipinas, when we held in August of that year another group exhibit at Sigwada Art Gallery. To hype up that show which I titled "Renascence", I wrote a series of essays about the participating artists. The two essays below were my write-ups on Bert Falsis  1. NOBLE, BRIGHT AND FAMOUS Bert Falsis' full first name is Elberto - a variation I guess of Albert, which means noble, bright and famous. Bert initially used Bert Falsis as his Facebook profile name, but decided to change it to Treb Falsis because a cousin who's also in the same line of business (printing)  insisted on also using Bert Falsis as his profile name. As his name implies, our Bert is very bright indeed. He and wi...

Below is the exhibition notes I wrote for the second Papelismo Group art exhibit at Galerie Anna in 2014) Essay 65. P A P E L M I S M O Benjie Torrado Cabrera, Renato Habulan, Alfredo Liongoren, Arnel Mirasol, and Pinggot Zulueta will unveil at the Galerie Anna, PAPELMISMO,  the sequel to their critically-acclaimed 2012 show, PAPELISMO. Joining the five this time are Thomas Daquioag, Neil Doloricon, Alfredo Esquillo, Egai Talusan Fernandez, Emmanuel Garibay, Pablo Baen Santos, and Allison Wong-David. Except for one or two, this roster of exhibit participants include names who belong to that group of brave souls who dare bucked the political and cultural establishment during the Marcos regime and went on to make bigger names for themselves in the Philippine art scene. Collectively referred to as the Social Realists, they are firm advocates of the art of commitment and social change. This is the second in a series of shows mapped out by Renato Habulan for this group of artists intent...

  Essay 64. FROM AUTODIDACT TO MASTER PAINTER By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  AMBROCIO MALLARI is an autodidact or self-taught painter. He is that in the sense that he never studied in a fine arts school. What Mallari knows about painting he learned when he worked as an apprentice in a shop in Manila that produced movie billboards or cartelons. His uncle Perfecto Mercado brought him there when he was still in his teens. That job was a huge opportunity for a boy who used to practice drawing by bringing pencil and paper whenever he drove their carabao to the pasture to graze. Knowing that the opportunity to study in college was beyond their means, Mallari took advantage of his time in the shop to absorb the secrets of the craft. In 1975, Mallari began painting easel-sized works on canvas. It didn't take long for him to master oil painting and he was able in time to sell his paintings in galleries in Pampanga and Manila and later on, even in Hawaii. Mallari was born in Concepcion, Ta...

  Essay 63. TRUE-BLUE SON OF ANGONO By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  The scenic Laguna de Bay is fringed almost all around by the lakeshore towns of Laguna and Rizal. Most prominent among those towns is Angono, the birthplace of the late great National Artist Carlos "Botong" Francisco. Acknowledged by many as the art capital of the Philippines, Angono boasts not only of having Botong Francisco as its native son, but also Lucio San Pedro, a National Artist for Music. Angono is also JOVITO ANDRES's native town. He was born there on December 14, 1966. His father was a farmer and fisherman. His interest in art was aroused even before grade school by the illustrations in the comics given them by his aunt (who was a comics distributor) which he religiously copied. The annual exhibits at the town plaza of famous painters like Jose Blanco, Nemiranda, Salvador Juban, Lito Balagtas, and Weng Unidad further boosted Andres's ambition to become a painter. The success of those painters ...

  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 ex...

  Essay 61. CHURCH PORTRAITS AND THEN SOME By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  I first became aware of AL PEREZ in the early 1970s, when his paintings of churches were featured, if my memory serves me right, in a magazine. That feature was probably a review of his first solo art exhibit at Galerie Bleue. It was a most auspicious beginning for the 25 year old Perez, because not only was his show graced by the heavyweights of the Philippine art scene, all the  paintings on show were also snapped up by art collectors, including the then first lady Imelda Marcos  Dubbed as the portrait artist of Philippine churches, Perez never tires of painting churches, although the formal qualities of the churches he paints today are a far cry from those that he painted in the past. Perez's early church paintings were academic, mere retinal transcriptions (as the art critic Leonidas Benesa would put it) of the subject matter before him. Even so, it proved to be what the art collectors wanted....

    Essay 60. ART JOURNEY OF THE MANGYAN ARTIST By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  Let me borrow a term that pertains to folklore or mythic narratives from long ago: Ethnic Genre. I supposed ethnic genre could also be used to categorize the subject matter of painters who like to portray or narrate in paint not only the visual attributes of members of ethnic tribes, but also their doings or way of life. Ethnic genre is different from ethnic art, which is but the aggregate of art objects the tribal natives create themselves. MATT RELOX specializes in ethnic genre. He was born in Mindoro - in Bansud, Oriental Mindoro specifically - a Philippine island whose indigenous inhabitants are the Mangyans. Relox is not of Mangyan ancestry himself, but living in relatively close proximity with these people whose way of life and peculiar clothing are very much different from those of the lowland inhabitants, Relox couldn't help but be inspired to document his impression of them in paint and o...

  Essay 59. THE DYNAMIC LADY PAINTER  By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  JOSEPHINE "ESANG" BEJASA ADAME belongs to a not quite long line of Filipino painters who espouse environmentalism in art. Most prominent among them are Prudencio Lamarroza and Rafael Cusi. I was at the opening of "Myth and Magic in the Image of Woman", Prudencio Lamarroza's 1984 art exhibit at the Gallery Genesis which featured his Amburayan Queen series. It was my first time to encounter the actual and stunning works of Lammaroza, the artist dubbed as an ecological painter by art critic Leo Benesa. Rafael Cusi, at around the same time, was also making a name for himself for his series of watercolors celebrating colorful marine life. Cusi is Esang's uncle. Thus, we can surmise that it was he who inspired Esang to take up art as her other profession. Why other profession? That's because Accounting is what Esang took up in college at the University of Batangas. She later earned her Master...

  Essay 58. OF LIGHTHOUSES AND DARK PLACES (The Art of Esther Sevilla-Garcia) "My spiritual calling is also to be the light and salt of the earth," so declared Esther at the conclusion of my online interview with her. Why salt? What's with salt? Jesus Christ in his sermon on the mount described the crowd he was addressing as the salt of the earth - by which he meant that they were worthy, virtuous, and valuable. Ester aspires to be like them. Esther's statement reveals her altruistic mindset. She opened her own gallery in Loyola Heights after graduating cum laude in Fine Arts (her second degree) at the University of the Philippines in 1998. Her gallery, the MSG Gallery, was where she held art workshops. Esther later on organized her students and formed the Amber Group. The thrust of her gallery being precisely to provide exposure to the art of her students, it was there that Esther mounted group shows to showcase their output. Sadly though, even if the Amber Group is ...

  Essay 57. HARI'S RAINBOW-COLORED WORLD By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  One hundred fifteen years after Pablo Picasso created the proto-cubist painting, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon",  Cubism continues to cast its spell on the present generation of artists. Cubism, was one of the pioneering styles that eschew depicting natural appearance in art, the dictum propounded by Picasso when he declared that "Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing." Filipino artists, painters and sculptors alike, took to the new style. Vicente Manansala, after his French sojourn, switched style and adopted Cubism, and abandoned for good the Botong Francisco style that had inspired him for some time.  Many Filipino painters followed Manansala's lead. Among them was the late Oscar Zalameda. Zalameda is Hari's lodestar. Both of them are natives of Lucban, Quezon. It is perhaps because of their shared affinity for that place why Hari adopted Zalameda'...

Essay 56. THE ARTIST AS A TECHNOLOGICAL MAN By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol The story is familiar: the life journey of a boy born into a family with meager means, who struggled hard to make something of himself, and attained in the end his dream of being a successful artist. The boy I speak of here is JERRY YBAÑEZ CONTRIDAS. Contridas was born in Calbayog, Western Samar to Pedrito M. Contridas and Norma Ybañez. His artistic ability manifested itself early, during his elementary school years. Contridas initially aspired to earn a degree in Fine Arts but was forced by his straitened circumstances to take up instead Graphic Arts and Printing Technology at the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP), a course which to his mind guaranteed immediate employment upon graduation. It was a four year course, and Contridas completed it by his own effort by working as a lay out artist at Hiyas Publishing House. After college, Contridas was assigned another position in addition to being a lay-o...

Essay 55. OF FABRIC PRINTS, JAPONISME, AND KLIMT By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol  MYLENE QUITO's art exudes feminity all over. Her paintings of blossoming flowers, mother and child, and even her abstracts, are all decorated with patterns not unlike the prints of dainty girl dresses. Mylene might have arrived at this style on her own, without her being influenced by artists doing similar works, but this style, Pattern and Decoration (P&D), has been around since the mid-1970s. The P&D Movement was organized to attract the critical attention monopolized then by conceptual and minimalist art. The P&D's distinct trait was its appropriation of fabric and wallpaper patterns, and also the arabesques and ornate designs of Islamic and other non-Western art.  Although often associated with feminism and feminine crafts like quilting, embroidery, and the like, the P&D Movement also has male adherents and practitioners. There's nothing surprising in that because this patternin...

  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 sug...

  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...

  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. H...

  Essay 51. CHRONICLER OF OUR PAST (The Art of Dan Libor) By Arnaldo Bernabe Mirasol Cinema advertising, the industry engaged in the production of huge movie billboards or "cartelons", was a field many starting painters from decades ago aspired to break into. It was seen as a somewhat steady source of income, (the proverbial bread and butter) because of the brisk demand then by movie producers and theaters for those hand-painted movie ads. Now a lost art, cinema advertising's seeming demise was caused by the influx of digitally-printed tarpaulins which ad clients must have found cheaper and of a higher quality because of their faithful reproduction of movie images. Cinema advertising was Dan Libor's stepping stone to a future career as a "serious painter". He started early. He was still a teenager when he was hired as cartelon painter in the early 1960s. His colleagues during those days were the young Ephraim Samson, Loreto Racuya, and Freddie Villanueva - a...