My Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 2. My Trip Around the Art World                                                                                        

Essay 16. MY FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME

Wikipedia defines 15 minutes of fame as a short-lived media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. It was derived from Andy Warhol's quote printed on the catalogue for an exhibition of his works at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 1968. These were Warhol's exact words: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Photographer Nat Finkelstein however disputed the universal attribution of that "fifteen minutes" phrase to Warhol. This was what happened according to Finkelstein. In 1966, while he was preparing to take photos of Warhol for a new book project, a crowd gathered beside Warhol wanting to be included in the pictures. Warhol supposedly quipped that everyone wants to be famous, to which Finkelstein added, "Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy."

Well, I got to taste that proverbial fifteen minutes of fame on September 5, 1984, during the awarding ceremony of the First Metrobank Annual Painting Competition. My entry to the competition, "Hungry Child Dissected", won one of the three Best Entry Awards.

The other two Best Entry winners were the paintings "August 6" by Roberto Feleo and "Mga Batang Pag-asa" by Joel Marayag Ferrer. The competition format then did away with the usual First, Second, and Third Prizes. All of us three Best Entry winners received ten thousand pesos and a medal each.

Ten thousand pesos may look measly compare to the more than two-hundred thousand pesos being awarded these days to the first prize winners. But to the aspiring young painters of the nineteen-eighties, that was a lot of money, perhaps equivalent now to more than a hundred thousand pesos. By the way, the ten thousand pesos prize money we received were not purchase prizes. We winners retained ownership of our works.

The competition format also called for another round of competition among us three Best Entry winners to determine the recipient of the Grand Prize---an educational scholarship worth twenty-thousand pesos. We three were asked to submit another five paintings each for judging.

There was a tie. Feleo and I both got the judges nod. The twenty-thousand pesos educational scholarship was split between me and Feleo. But I never availed of it because I've decided that I had enough of schooling already. I got married too less than seven months later,  pushing me to put a priority on getting a job. What I availed of was the thirty thousand pesos-exhibit grant Metrobank gives each major-prize winners which I used to cover the expenses of my 2007 solo art exhibit at the Crucible Gallery.

I had difficulty choosing which of the two paintings I considered as my best at that time to enter in the competition. Aside from Hungry Child Dissected, I also considered "Lupa" as my entry. Close friends I consulted chose Lupa (Land), but I decided on Hungry Child because I saw it as more innovative. Lupa was painted rather conservatively. The technique I used in that work followed closely the classical realist way of crafting a painting

Hungry Child Dissected was part of a series of paintings I did where I began experimenting with new composition formats, painting techniques, and materials. There were lots of straight lines in those paintings, and materials like ink, silver tempera, acrylic, and modeling paste were used freely. Magazine cut-outs and photographs were also incorporated into the paintings as collages. The most telling innovation, however, was my use of real fish-bones as collage material.

After the triumph of Hungry Child Dissected, other painters were inspired to also glue fishbones onto their paintings, including another Metrobank Best Entry winner, the late Lito Lopez, who was a fellow fine arts student at the University of the East (UE). Lopez won in the second edition of the competition in 1985. His fellow winners were the late Gabriel Barredo and Michael Tan.

I bid goodbye to Hungry Child Dissected many years ago. After keeping it in my possession for 15 years, and in the Metrobank Foundation office for another 11 years, I've finally decided to let it go. I pulled that painting out from Metrobank in 2010, and afterwards offered it to a UE Fine Arts schoolmate, Elvira "Vheng" Gonzaga, who didn't hesitate to buy it. This was her third purchase from me. Vheng had already bought two of my paintings - "Supremacy of Eve" and "Music is a Magic Carpet".

Vheng is among my several UE friends who made good in life. She and another art collector, Arnel Dolatre, top my list of successful Fine Arts classmates. That's because painters like me hold art collectors in high-esteem. Art collectors decide the fate of artists. They get to choose which artist will flourish and which artist will starve. Since we owe them our living, art collectors are like angels to us. I thank God therefore for art collectors.

I also thank the Metrobank Foundation for giving me the chance to shine. That fame I basked in three decades ago may have lasted for only fifteen minutes, in a manner of speaking, but the memories of it are forever imprinted, hopefully, on the news clippings about the event I saved and on the catalogues of the painting competition published by the Metrobank Foundation.

-2020

,,,