Works on Paper

 

Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 3. In my Book

                                                                          Essay 39. WORKS ON PAPER

Noted painter Renato Habulan invited me to join him and other noted artists, Fred Liongoren, Benjie Torrado Cabrera, and Pinggot Zuleta, in an exhibit of paintings on paper. The show, "Papelismo",  opened at the Crucible Gallery on September 4, 2012. It was the first in a series of shows by the Papelismo group.

It was late 2011 when Ato send me a message about his plan to mount such a show, because he was of the impression then that works on paper were supposedly being ignored by artists and art collectors alike. 

Well, there may be truth to that, because Atty. Jing David, owner of Galerie Anna, had also observed the same thing. We were at the Altro Mondo, during the opening of an exhibit of our group of Metrobank painting competition winners, when he told me that galleries find it difficult to increase the price of paintings on paper. He observed that there seems to be a certain ceiling beyond which the prices of paintings on paper cannot go. 

Sari Ortiga, President of the Crucible Gallery, also expressed a similar opinion. He suggested that I do more oils on canvas, because they are easier to sell. And he was right there, because the three oils I exhibited in my second solo show at the Crucible in 2007, were bought wholesale by a single collector at a good price. I surmised that one reason why collectors seem to be reluctant to buy paintings on paper is the perceived 'perishability' of such works. Pish posh! I say to that.

The painting "A Gift of War" (top painting in the photo collage above) is one of my oldest extant works. It is a 1983 acrylic on Ingres-Fabriano paper. Compared to my old oils done during the same period, this painting aged admirably well. While my old oil paintings have lost their luster because of the accumulated dust and grime, the colors of this painting have surprisingly retained their original intensity. And the paper is still far from crumbling.

In my later works, I have used acrylic mostly on Canson Montval paper. Sometimes, when I finished a work, the paper buckled or warped because of the many acrylic washes I applied to it. This may surprised you, but what I did to straighten the paper out was immersed it for a second or two in a tub of water, and then hanged it on a line to dry. Once dried, the paper regained its flatness with the colors remaining undisturbed and intact. 

One way of protecting paintings on paper is to always keep them framed under glass or wrapped in plastic, which I should say isn't an inconvenient or expensive thing to do, compared again to what should be done to prevent an oil painting from collecting dust and grime---which is to display them in a dust-free or air-conditioned room.

By the way, "A Gift of War", which was my plate for our Composition class at the UE School of  Fine Arts, was one of the two paintings I submitted to a gallery in 1985 for approval. Our group, the SETA Movement, intended then to hold our first show at that gallery. 

We asked a fellow UE fine arts student and one of the gallery's resident artists, to intercede for us. But he, to our disappointment, returned with the word that our exhibit proposal was rejected. He said that the reason the gallery owner wasn't sold on our proposal was because she considered this painting an illustration. Today I'm still baffled why she said that, because any competent art practitioner could easily see that A Gift of War is a serious work of art , a pure painting, and not an illustration.

It seems that many are still confused about the difference between an illustration and 'pure or serious' painting. A pure painting can stand by itself, that is, it doesn't need a manuscript to give it significance, unlike an illustration which owes its existence from it. An illustration is a pictorial depiction of a story, or visual adornment for or of a product which is meant to be printed at the outset in commercial quantity. Thus, art for books, calendars, commercial ads, and greeting cards are all illustrations. 

The illustrative quality of a particular work doesn't lie in its having linear or non-painterly characteristics. A foreign art restorer who worked on Botong Francisco's large-scale painting "The Pageant of Commerce" remarked that "there is a thin line between illustration and painting in the linear style". He added that "Francisco's painting is a prime example of linear painting where lines and contours appear like cut-outs". He was in effect saying that that Botong Francisco painting is almost like an illustration because of its linear quality. 

I don't agree. I have seen several illustrations that are non-linear and some almost abstract in style, where the brushworks are loose and painterly and the edges of the images blurred. 

On the other hand, to further prove my point, I will cite the frescoes of Luca Signorelli and Diego Rivera, Michelangelo's "Doni Madonna", Andrew Wyeth's temperas, and the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites,  to name a few, as prime examples of linear works that are pure paintings, not illustrations.

Well, that is how I understand it. I'd welcome the comment of anyone who has a different take on the matter.