AMIRASOLO AND OTHER ESSAYS

Amirasolo and Other Essays                         Part 3. In my Book Essay 40. THE BUTANDINGS' PICNIC  ZONE The painting at the top of the photo collage above is a composite where I used as references several pictures taken at different locations and occasions. I wasn't even at sea when my picture was taken. I was inside our house and wasn't wearing around my head any 'antipara' or wood-carved goggles at all. The rocky island behind is Sumilon, way back when it was still undeveloped and hasn't become the high-end tourist destination it is now. The distant mountains and the white shoreline at left is Oslob, Cebu, where our branch of the Mirasol clan hails from. The characters of course are me and Carina with our two sons, and their cousins and friends. I painted Bahgee into this picture thrice and Kai twice. The event depicted in this painting happened in 1994, when whale sharks as tourist attraction were still unhear...

  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 Al...

Amirasolo and Other Essays Part 3. In my Book Essay 38. DKNY EXPRESS I painted DKNY Express in 2012. The jeepney image was a variant of a cartoon I designed and printed on t-shirts in 1992. The female guitarist figure in turn was an image I came up with after I switched style in 2008, and started experimenting and subjecting my human forms to simplification and distortion. I called the suite of paintings of slender females I produced during this period my 'slim series'. This painting is closely connected with two of my UST High School classmates---Arn Cruz and Ray Espinosa. The DKNY of the title doesn't mean Donna Karan New York. It is the tongue-in-cheek abbreviation, or initialism, for Divisoria Kanto ng Ylaya (Divisoria corner Ylaya), which are places in Manila frequented by bargain-hunters. I first heard of 'Divisoria Kanto ng Ylaya' from Arn Cruz when he gave me and another classmate a lift in his car on our way home to Tondo. When I said that our house is ju...

  Amirasolo and Other Essays Part 3. In my Book Essay 37. EROTIC AIR IN THE TALE OF RAPUNZEL Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn't have children in mind as their primary audience when they put out the first editions of their book, Kinder-und Hausmarchen (Children and Household Tales) in 1812 and 1815. It was only in the 1819 edition did they begin to eliminate passages with erotic content to make it more palatable to bourgeois morality and taste. For the curious out there, here is the English translation of an excerpt from "Rapunzel" as originally written and published in 1812: "At first Rapunzel was afraid, but soon she took such a liking to the young king that she made an agreement with him: he was to come everyday and be pulled up. Thus they lived merrily and joyfully for a certain time, and the fairy did not discover anything until one day when Rapunzel began talking to her and said, "Tell me, Mother Gothel, why do you think my clothes have become too tight for m...

   Amirasolo and Other Essays Part 3. In my Book Essay 36. ARTIST STATEMENT FOR LORD OF THE REEF (Lalyn Buncab, curator of the Museum of the Dela Salle University, invited me to join an exhibit she's organizing. That was in early 2018. The show, MUKHA: PORTRAITS OF HISTORIES AND STORIES, had for its theme, portraits. Posted above is my piece for the show---the painting "Lord of the Reef". Below is my Artist Statement.) ARTIST STATEMENT This painting is a self-portrait---though not obviously so, because of the diving mask covering my face. If you look closely you'll discern that the eyes, eyebrows, and moustache of the diver are my eyes, eyebrows, and moustache. Also, the attire and diving gear were what I used to wear then. But even though this work is a self-portrait, the scene is just imaginary. I am just role-playing here. The painting is a portrayal of my fascination with the sea and my admiration for and awe of spear-fishermen who I considered before as sportsmen...

  Amirasolo and Other Essays Part 3. In my Book Essay 35. BLACK The story Mon Villanueva told us might be apocryphal. The source of that story was a former student of the University of the East School of Music and Fine Arts (UESMFA). This student related that on the first day of their painting class, their instructor inspected their oil paint sets, took the tubes of black paint out of the boxes, and threw them out the window. The reason, the instructor declared, was because in his class, the use of black in their paintings is forbidden. That was a ridiculous and tyrannical gesture---an overacted dramatics by that instructor who could have just ordered his students to leave their tubes of black paint at home. Some art teachers from way way back have forbidden the use of black in painting. I've heard first hand one or two instructors telling us to use, in lieu of real black, a mixture of all  the primary colors---lots of blue and red and a little yellow. That was a dictum pro...

  Amirasolo and Other Essays Part 3. As I See it Essay 34. CERTIFICATES OF INAUTHENTICITY One day, I and my cycling buddy Isko Dela Cruz dropped by the house of a painter who was copying an Amorsolo painting. The painter's improvised studio was outside the house, on the narrow front yard separated from the sidewalk by a top to bottom grill fence. The sidewalk was along Samson Road in Caloocan, just walking distance from Baltazar Bukid Street where Isko lives. The fence being just grill work, we could see from where we stood on the sidewalk the man at work. The painter, whose name I forgot, told us that he's already based in Canada, an immigrant petitioned by his daughter. He's just here on vacation, he said. On his easel was an unfinished reproduction of an Amorsolo painting. According to him, he used to do several such reproductions when he was younger which he consigned with a gallery in Ermita. While conversing with him, a friend of his, a fellow painter, came along....