Bencab: The book

This Thursday, Nov. 7, at 6 p.m., to be launched at the Meralco Bldg. lobby is a handsome coffeetable book simply titled Bencab.

About time, too. This hefty classic of an art book took nearly all of three years of painstaking production. Were it not for the determination of Manolo and Maritess Lopez, longtime patrons and eventual publishers (Mantes Publishing, Inc.), our common friend Benedicto Cabrera might have had to wait even longer for this long-deserved paean to his popularly and critically acclaimed art.

Some 20 pieces of Ben’s canvases, prints and illustrations, culled from various collectors and representing the dynamically evolving phases of his continuing lifework, will be on temporary exhibit as a highlight of the launch.

We are honored to have been part of the effort behind the book, which comes out at 288 pages in full color, complete with a timeline, a selected bibliography, and an index, much of these to be credited to Annie Sarthou, project manager.

Thelma Sioson San Juan served as editor, Noli C. Galang as book designer, Ricardo M. de Ungria as copy editor, Ivan Acuña as photographer, Girlie Pineda Canlas as editorial assistant, with the legendary Louie O. Reyes on top of production. Quite a team it is, so that it was a privilege for Cid Reyes and myself to be credited with co-authorship.

Ben’s been a friend since the ’60s; no other decade lends itself more magnanimously to memorious camaraderie. Thus did we enjoy writing our part of the book.

Cid, unarguably our best art critic at present, and himself an artist, wrote Part 2, "The Art of Being Filipino." It offers a critical discourse – no, wait, that sounds too formal, something that Cid Reyes’ easily accessible text always wisely avoids engaging in. Let’s say it’s an extended aesthetic appreciation of Bencab’s lifework. And boy, is it knowledgeable, familiar, erudite, wonderfully contextual.

Part 1 is written by yours truly, upon Ben’s request, which came with a metaphysical offer this writer-on-commission could not refuse. It is a mini-biography of sorts, titled "Hand Over Heart: A Life for Bencab."

Not so shamelessly now, here’s an excerpt from our life account of a lifetime friend, in the form of three brief chapters:

First Exhibit

Ben worked at the (U.S.) embassy till 1965, the same year he participated in his first group exhibit at the AAP office at the UNESCO Bldg. on Herran St. It was a three-man show with his buddies Virgilo "Pandy" Aviado and Marciano "Mars" Galang, who had been instrumental in influencing Ben to go beyond sketching and try his hand at painting.

The threesome often went together on on-the-spot sketching and painting excursions around Manila, mostly by the seawall off Luneta, rendering boats and ships on paper and canvas, or at the Binondo district with its network of esteros or canals, to document the shantytowns that flanked both banks. Pandy had also introduced Ben to etching, a demanding art form that, to his pleasant surprise, lent itself very well to his detailed renditions of the barong-barong or shanties.

It was the U.S. Embassy that sponsored the show, which featured mostly Ben’s small paintings of landscapes priced at P40 each, together with his Bambang drawings, watercolors, and poster-color art works. The latter medium he had picked up from its trendy use by Kuya Bading and his group. Poster colors had become a bit of a fashion, even among notable painters like Malang and his contemporaries. The medium would eventually be called gouache.

At the time, Ben wasn’t fond of handling oil paint. He had used oil in his student days in UP, but wasn’t particularly enamored of the medium. He preferred to experiment with other media and materials.

To differentiate himself from his better-known brother and a cousin named Benjie Cabrera who was also plying the commercial art market, Ben settled on identifying himself as BenCab, which eventually became Bencab. He sold about 70 percent of his works in this first one-man exhibit, a result that was considered quite successful for a young artist.

Soon after he held his first painting exhibit, Ben got word from Bading that his friend Noli Galang was resigning from his layouting duties at The Sunday Times magazine, to join the exodus of writer-editor Johnny Gatbonton’s group to Hong Kong. Ben had already done some sideline work for special magazine issues, such as for the Sunday Mirror. He liked the prospect of forming even closer association with writers and artists, reviewers and critics, cartoonists and opinion makers. Joining the Fourth Estate seemed like an exciting opportunity.

He decided to leave his job at USIS and sign up with The Manila Times publishing group, which designated him as assistant layout artist and illustrator for the arts-and-culture-oriented Sunday Times magazine. It was a whole new world of friends and contemporaries – the likes of the veteran illustrator Roddy Ragodon, the popular cartoon strip creator and editorial cartoonist Severino "Nonoy" Marcelo, the columnists Jean Pope and A.O. Flores, the illustrator Demetrio Diego, and the photographer Romy Vitug with whom Ben became close friends.

For a time he also took a night job as a portraitist at a popular bohemian hangout, the piano bar named Cock-n- Bull Tavern on Taft Ave. off the corner of Vito Cruz. Its resident artist was Ely Santiago, who had also been at UP. His humorous take-offs on the bar’s patrons were well-received, and were hung on the walls to honor the regular clientele. Ely thought of bringing Ben in to sub for him on some nights.

Owned and managed by the writer Lilia Amansec, the nightspot had another come-on in jazz pianist Ernie Donida, whose Cole Porter renditions satisfied Nick Joaquin no end. Ben still recalls how notable writers and artists like Nick and Ishmael Bernal, then barely out of UP himself, would give him a bottle of beer every time he sketched them at Cock-n-Bull. But he was allergic to alcohol, so that some nights his father would be summoned to pick him up and take him home.

Ishmael Bernal eventually set up his own nightspot, When It’s A Grey November in Your Soul Coffeeshop, on A. Mabini St. in Malate. Folk singing had been the rage among the college crowd. But there was also a trend toward quieter places where the culturati could argue over coffee and beer about art and existentialism.

Disco dancing had also been popular for a time, its advent brought to an early peak by the pioneering Black Angel Discotheque on Shaw Blvd. in Mandaluyong, run by the young ingenue Beatriz Romualdez. But the imported craze was to decline temporarily in favor of the cafe ambience that shrouded everyone in wisps of cigarette smoke, piano or classical music, and witty conversation on everything exciting that spelled the ferment of the mid-to-late-Sixties – the Vietnam War, baby boomers, the Beatles, Flower Power, the hippies, the miniskirt, Twiggy and London fashion, Ferdinand Marcos’ election and re-election as President, his beauteous wife Imelda...

Artist Of Los Indios Bravos

Beatriz "Betsy" Romualdez, a niece of Imelda and a feature writing contributor to Sunday Times magazine, opened Cafe Los Indios Bravos in 1966, down the road from Bernal’s Grey November on Mabini, closer to the Remedios St. corner. It had a quiet opening, and attracted only a few close friends in the art circles in its first few weeks. Some habitués of Grey November would check it out – including the UP Writers Club poets Willie Sanchez, Erwin Castillo and Frankie Osorio – and decide to stay only if they were allowed to drink from bottles of cheap gin sheathed in paper bags. Otherwise they trooped back to Grey November where "Bernie," later called "Ishma" when he became a successful film director, allowed them beers on credit.

But soon word picked up and Indios Bravos’ fashionable interiors – an eclectic mix of colonial furniture, stained-glass windows, a spiral staircase that led to a mezzanine, a Tiffany lamp hanging over a center table often reserved for the doyens and doyennes of art and culture – and exemplary ambience started drawing a regular crowd. Half of the clientele was made up of writers, artists, musicians and theater people, while the other half were the usual gawkers who marveled at the array of cognoscenti for the night.

At the center table often presided the poet Virginia Moreno together with Betsy Romualdez, then engaged and eventually to be married to filmmaker Henry Francia, hosting such luminaries as Hilario "Larry" Francia the poet-painter, Adrian Cristobal the satirist who also served as spokesman at the Palace, Nick Joaquin the pre-eminent Filipino writer, the New York-based premier poet Jose Garcia Villa whenever he deigned to come home for a visit, Napoleon "Billy" Abueva the sculptor, Leo Benesa, Francisco "Kit" Tatad who also served Marcos in Malacañang as his young Press Secretary, art collector Lorna Montilla, the American filmmaker Mike Parsons...

On the fringes were the young, upcoming writers, artists, dancers and musicians, including Bencab and his close friends Mars Galang, Pandy Aviado, Nonoy Marcelo and Romy Vitug. Among the young poets were the brothers Jose "Pete" Lacaba and Emmanuel "Eman" Lacaba.

Beside Los Indios Bravos was an apartment that was turned into the Gallery Indigo, above which Ben rented a room where he labored deep into the night on his early paintings.

Gallery Indigo

He had always been acknowledged as an outstanding draftsman, as manifested in the admirable graphic work he did for the magazine. Ben knew that it was up to him to take his gift to higher levels that would involve originality and freshness, a uniqueness of style that would identify his works as distinctively his own, and eventually an overriding vision. Although he didn’t have to push himself hard, given his innate love of sketching everything around him to its minutest detail, he worked at his artistic growth with a passion.

Pen-and-ink was his forte. Now he added the use of gouache to his growing arsenal of media with which to explore a world, or several worlds, he would eventually make his own. Thematic concerns would come later; for now he was distilling all he had learned from everyone around him whose work he had admired. This included his beloved brother’s own art, as well as the production of his mentors at UP, especially Joya, whose adroit experimentations in merging the abstract with his own fine gifts at figurative composition motivated Ben no end.

He himself proved exemplary when it came to figurative rendering. Surely he could also expand his metier to incorporate subtle expressions of light and shadow, of symbolism, of mythic proportioning, of conceptual explorations and the imagistic use of conceits and ideas. He started stretching his figurative exercises toward soft abstraction.

At the embassy, Ben and other aspiring artists were privy to publications that paraded new trends and revolutionary advances in painting. Some of the magazines they pored over came from Europe, notably France. The art of Franz Kline impressed him. He was open to all influences, but chose to incorporate only what was utilitarian, rather than what was available. He found himself altering his approach to composition, while retaining his strong suit that was a meticulous fidelity to the real world, of real objects and real people.

It was Betsy Romualdez herself, together with Virgie Moreno, who had encouraged him to open Gallery Indigo with an exhibit of his new works. It was to be his first one-man show. Publicist Bibsy Carballo served as the gallery curator. Later Ben was to bring in Salvador Cabrera to work with Bibsy on a gallery workshop series for young artists.

That 1966 exhibit jump-started Ben’s reputation as a promising artist. Influential friends and celebrities graced the affair, among them the well-respected art historian Alfredo "Ding" Roces and Miss Universe beauty titlist Gemma Cruz. Enfant terrible Jollico Cuadra wrote glowingly of Ben’s art. His works sold out.