My Interview with artyii

 

MY INTERVIEW WITH artyii

(Artyii is an online art gallery based in Singapore. On May 5, 2011, I received an email from Olivia Isabelle of artyii asking me to agree to be interviewed by her. Below are my answers to her interview questions.)

SHARE A STORY WITH US. HOW DID YOU START TO PAINT?

I began drawing even before I enter school. My drawings of course were just childish doodles similar to those done by other boys my age. But what set me apart from them was my persistence in learning how to draw as realistically as possible. Besides, while the other boys got tired of drawing, I didn't. The compulsion to draw never left me.

I drew on all available surfaces, even on the wooden walls of our house. My first drawing tools were pencils and crayons. When I was in grade one, I started using watercolor and later on, colored pencils. I was also in grade one when my artistic talent was sort of discovered by my teacher Miss Mercy Ramos. She asked us her pupils to submit as project a colored drawing of a bird, which I did using felt pen and watercolor. I must have done it convincingly, because Miss Ramos brought me forthwith, proudly, to the office of the Assistant Principal who likewise praised my work.

I was most prolific in my art making when I was twelve years old. Our Shop and Art teacher was our scoutmaster Mr. Joe R.R. Mortera. I and my classmates in his class, all boys incidentally, were taught the rudiments of perspective and isometric drawing, in preparation perhaps for an Architecture or Engineering course in college. Mr. Joe also required us to do drawings of flowers, fruits, birds, fishes and other animals using colored pencils, and even "abstract expressionist paintings" on paper with melted crayons as medium. As a result of this incessant artmaking, I was able to compile  a thick album of artworks, which, unfortunately,  was lost in a fire that burned down our neighborhood in 1969, a month after we graduated from elementary. A great pity. Occupied with documenting as I am these days, it would have pleased me a lot to have a record of my development as a painter, from when I was a child until now when I'm in my mid-fifties. 

My mother Mama Ninay bought me my first box of oil paints just before I enter high school. Through habit, I first used water to thin the paint. I realized my mistake right away, got myself a few spoonfuls of edible oil in a cup (I've never heard of linseed oil then), and climbed up to the roof of our  house to begin painting. Not having any canvas on hand, I just used a small piece of scrap plywood as my painting surface. I remember that for my first painting, I chose the sunset at Manila Bay as subject matter. Our house is near the Manila North Harbor, and from the roof, I can see the topmost parts of the ships, the sea, and the mountain of Bataan in the far distance. I avoided painting the ships, because I found their bows, funnels, and masts very complicated. I just painted the Bataan mountain and the colorful twilight sky 

In high school, a Literature teacher who also paints, Mr. Benjamin Roda, sold me two Grumbacher "How to Paint" books. Those proved truly useful. Because everything I know about the fundamentals of painting I learned from those books. 

WHAT FACTORS INFLUENCED YOUR ART OR STYLE THE MOST?

I was very much fascinated by books from the time I was a boy. Many times in the past, I found my artistic inspirations in art books, like the time when I was browsing in a bookstore in 1981. I saw in a book a painting by Salvador Dali showing a naked child, a girl, lifting the edge of a blanket which is also the edge of the sea, and underneath which a dog lies sleeping. The title of the painting is "Sea-Shade-Dog". That painting got me hooked. And I decided then and there that I'm going to be a surrealist too, like Dali.

The moment I had the money, I went back to the bookstore to buy that book, which to my dismay was already sold. I saw another book,  "The Life and Art of Salvador Dali" by Robert Descharnes, which I bought right away. The book which is still with me and which had become my painting bible of sorts, had provided inspirations for many of my early surrealist paintings.  

That period was the heyday of the Filipino social realists who were bent on doing art with overt proletarian themes. Images of poverty, exploitation, and government repression were the staples of paintings then. I rode the trend, seeing in it the twist needed to make my surrealist paintings deviate a bit from Dali's. If Dali's surrealism emanated as he asserted from his subconscious, mine emanated from my conscious awareness of the dystopian nature of Philippine society. Though the paintings I did during that period weren't commercially successful, I could say that it had given me some foretaste of Andy Warhol's proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame". A painting from that period - which I called my "social-surrealist" phase - won for me and  Roberto Feleo the grand prize in the First Metrobank Annual Painting Competition in 1984. It was a most prestigious competition then as it is at present. 

Now, three decades after my encounter with that surrealist book, I still haven't weaned myself away from the influence exerted on me by art books. I still sought inspirations from them from time to time. I bought books whenever my meager finances allowed it, that I now have in my cramped and not so neat workplace a mini-library of sorts.

WHAT WAS THE TURNING POINT IN YOUR ARTISTIC CAREER?

I'd say that it was when I got hired in 1996 by Reni Roxas and Marc Singer, publishers of Tahanan Books for Young Readers, to illustrate picture books for them. It was while working for Tahanan that I and my artworks got featured in magazines and newspapers. I can also say that I was at the peak of my career when I did for Tahanan the illustrations for three books, namely, "The Brothers Wu and the Good-Luck Eel", "Once Upon a Time", and " Long Ago and Far Away". I even got to show and sell the original illustrations for the last two books at my two consecutive solo exhibitions in the Crucible Gallery here in Manila. My second show at the Crucible yielded an unexpected bonus. It managed to earn a review from the highly- respected art critic, Constantino Tejero. My illustrations for the Brothers Wu, on the other hand, landed me on the 2002 Honour List of the Basel-based International Board on Books for Young People .

But what made me really consider my years with Tahanan as the turning point in my art career was because it was during that time that I entertained the idea to again do some serious painting on the side. The suite of paintings I managed to complete in between the time I was doing illustrations was exhibited side by side with my Brothers Grimm illustrations during my 2007 solo at the Crucible Gallery. 

TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR LATEST WORKS.

I am now on my second year of working on the illustrations for the tentatively titled "Mga Modernong Alamat/ Modern Legends". The book, written by Segundo Matias, jr., requires 28 illustrations, and is to be published by Lampara Books. The book is a compilation of four stories (Legend of the Eagle, Legend of the Bamboo, Legend of the Carabao, and Legend of Rice), and each story would have seven illustrations each. The illustrations for the Legends of the Eagle and the Bamboo were rendered in acrylic on paper. After completing the 14 illustrations for those two stories, I kind of grew tired of doing things the same old way

and decided to try my hand at something more challenging, which is to do the next series of illustrations for the Legend of Rice in oil on big canvases. It was challenging indeed, and at least for me,  ground-breaking too. Because I have developed in this series of illustrations  new composition formats, motifs, and brush techniques which I will use later on in my "serious" paintings. And so far, the remarks made on my current output is very heartening. A former UST Fine Arts classmate, Corito Magpile, even considered an illustration for the Legend of Rice - the "Miss Butterfly"  - as the best artwork I've done so far.

As I've mentioned before, I'm also doing some serious painting on the side, which I see as the more experimental aspect of my art making. Before 2008, the paintings I did can be categorized in terms of technique as sharp- focus realist art, the same label tagged onto Andrew Wyeth's paintings. It was during that year, 2008, that I did "Venus Of Boracay", my first appropriation of Titian's "Venus of Urbino",  which I painted in imitation of Fernando Botero's obese human forms. Everything in that painting was experimental - from my utilization of figural distortion and abstract forms, to my employment of palette knife for applying paint to the background. The Venus of Boracay belongs to what I called my Deconstructed Venuses series, which would later on include two more paintings - "My Serenade" and "The Decline and Fall of the Greek Trumpeter". Some people may consider this Deconstructed Venuses images as somewhat profane, so, I took a new tack, and started a series on people involve in acts other than seduction. Since obesity is oftentimes associated with excess and decadence, I did a complete reverse and drew my new figures of women thinner and long-limbed.

TELL US ABOUT THE GREATEST SACRIFICE YOU HAD TO MAKE TO PURSUE YOUR ARTISTIC PASSION.

One time just before I finished high school, my father Papa Nene had a talk with me. Even though he knew that I wanted to take up fine arts in college, he still proposed that I should take up law instead. He said that he could afford to finance my college studies no matter what course I take because he was already earning good money at the time as a chief marine engineer. He added that having a lawyer in the family was a sort of family dream, because his own father wanted him to be a lawyer, too. Besides, he added, and this floored me, since lawyers are very fond of arguing, the law profession would suit me fine, because I was fond anyway of reasoning out with my mother.

Well, looking back, I realized that I perhaps would have been a lawyer and earning lucrative fees b now had I put my mind to studying law. I've always known that I have a sharp memory, and am a voracious reader too. Thus, all the memorizations and required readings at law school wouldn't have intimidated me. 

But the pull of the muse was stronger. When the time came for me to enroll at the UST College of Fine Arts, I didn't even choose as my major, Advertising. I chose to pursue Painting, which according to my sister is a profession suitable only for rich people who will still eat even if they never sell a single painting. She must be wrong there, because nowadays, I see all around me painters who've become rich painting full time. Of course, she may have uttered the truth in my case, because after decades of striving, I still have not risen to the ranks of the fabulous truly best-selling painters.

Let me conclude with these words. Truman Capote, in the preface to his book "Music for Chameleons", wrote: When God hands you a gift, He also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation." Well, that is the story of my life, an artist's life, which in retrospect, seem more torturous than gratifying. But I have no regrets: I chose to be a painter. I'm not particularly devout, but my fervent belief in my destiny as a painter betrays a certain spirituality on my part. I'm convinced that whoever created us placed me, and all serious artists for that matter, on this earth for no other purpose than to create art.

- 2011