On Multiplicity of Styles

 

Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 3. In my Book

Essay 44. ON MULTIPLICITY OF STYLES

My painting "Jolly Kids" (above) clearly shows the stylistic gulf separating my current artworks from those I did in the 1980s up to the year 2007. My UST high school classmate Vince Tabirara remarked that he can't quite figure out my style. He said that my artworks don't have a distinct look that would readily identify them as mine. I replied that my having a multiplicity of styles was inevitable, considering that the artworks he saw in my portfolio were done over a period of more than thirty years.

I had a varied art career. My first professional works were paintings belonging to the social realist school, but with a surrealist twist a la Dali. I was an editorial cartoonist for several years and then textbook illustrator, jobs where I put my knack for cartooning and caricatures to good use. 

It was when I became a picture book illustrator that I can truly say that I've exhausted the limits of realism. My fairy tale illustrations were replete with minute details rendered in true "kutkutan" fashion. I eventually grew tired of that style, especially after a fellow painter described me as obsessive-compulsive and his writer-wife in turn predicted that I won't get rich because of the excessively long time I take to finish an illustration. Even though said in jest, their remarks being on point stung me a little and got me worried. Thus, I changed style.

I'm not the only one who did. I could cite the names of numerous painters whose bodies of works would reveal several stylistic changes. Pablo Picasso was the most prominent and extreme example. Picasso was a child prodigy. He can already draw like Raphael when he was twelve years old, and he was just fifteen when he came out with paintings comparable to the mature works of the leader of the French Realist School, Gustave Courbet.

But Picasso wouldn't rest on his laurels. He chucked off that realist style for good in Paris when he created his poignant series of blue paintings. But before that, on the eve of his departure from Spain, he did a suite of pastel drawings more evocative of Roualt---with their dark outlines and simplified figures---than of Courbet. These, Picasso's Blue Period paintings done during his starving years, were pictures of sadness, poverty, and misfortune.

In 1907, Picasso came out with the landmark painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" which was to become the prototype for Cubism. He next came up with his Neo-classical series, where the figures this time are of robust proportions, quietly reminiscent of Michelangelo even if overly simplified and distorted. The painting which many consider his masterpiece, the "Guernica", was apparently a fusion or synthesis of his cubist and neo-classic styles. Picasso went on to create in rapid succession more paintings of different forms or styles which art historians no longer bother to label or classify.

Another painter who have trekked the style spectrum, so to speak, was the surrealist Salvador Dali who started out as an impressionist. With the advent of cubism, he promptly did paintings that mimicked closely those by Picasso. He also produced minimalist mixed-media abstracts when such were in vogue, and even what could be classified as a semi-abstract expressionist print where he used as tool, in lieu of brushes, an improvised grenade packed with nail shrapnels. When this so-called "apocalyptic granate" was detonated deep below a ravine, the nails embedded themselves on the surface of copper plates arranged like a box in the ravine leaving nail marks all over. Prints were made on large parchments using these copper plates one of which Dali jazzed up afterwards with an image of the Pieta and other adornments on the border using watercolor. The title of this piece is "Pieta of the Apocalypse of Saint John".

When Dali became a member of the surrealist movement he focused his efforts in creating dream-inspired paintings of mutating forms and double images rendered in his trademark illusionistic-surrealist manner. But unlike Picasso who stuck to his violent deconstructions or distortion of the human figure to the end, Dali's imagery in his later years, especially in his large-scale religious paintings, showed a resurgent concern with correct anatomy. His last painting though was a return to the minimalism of his youth. He just depicted in that painting lines resembling an outline of the tail of a bird and a motif or two from a violin.

Other artists who've switched or used simultaneously different painting styles in the course of their career were, to name a few among the foreign painters, Camille Pissaro, George Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Stanley Spencer. Filipino artists who did the same were Nena Saguil, Alfredo Roces, Hernando Ocampo, Jerry Navarro, Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, David Medalla, Santiago Bose, and Bencab, among others. Vicente Manansala, who was the first proponent of cubism here didn't start out as a cubist. His earlier works were influenced somewhat by Botong Francisco.

So you see, switching styles doesn't really diminished a painter. True, an artist who changes styles often might just be the impressionable type, or one who is easily influenced by anything he regards as superior ---which I confess I sometimes am. But the opposite could in fact be truer, because hopping from style to style can also be a mark of versatility, or even ingenuity. It might actually be just a manifestation of the artist's restless spirit and fondness for novelty and experimentation.