Abandoned in Sta. Ana

Fabian dela Rosa and His Times (Filipiniana.net books/Vargas Museum) includes at least two paintings of the artist that deal with Sta. Ana, a district in Manila that must have changed much since its days as an idyllic borough in the painter’s time, spanning the end of the Spanish period and well into the American occupation.

Edited by art scholar and academic Ana Labrador, the book which is not exactly a coffee-table one features essays by four art critics, Labrador among them, that focus on the importance of Dela Rosa as a painter in the context of Philippine art history, coming as he did after Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo and before his presumed blood relative (they have the same middle name) the National Artist Fernando Amorsolo. Luna, Resurreccion Hidalgo, Dela Rosa and Amorsolo certainly are the most identifiable, recognizable names spanning the colonial periods in Philippine art history preceding the moderns, with perhaps Dela Rosa the least known among them, and which this book hopes to correct as judging by the works represented here, he was in the league of the greats. And if photographs can convey such aspect of his paintings, what more if faced with the real oil on canvas works that may contain occult revelations and insights.

Although it is only appropriate that the painter’s best known work “Planting Rice” is on the cover (indeed prefiguring the rustic landscapes and rural folk of Amorsolo), what catches the eye of the urban Manila dweller is the sort of frontispiece “River View of Sta. Ana,” that has at its center a portion of the winding river Pasig, perhaps in that section separating Lamayan (Sta. Ana) and Namayan (Mandaluyong), where today the Lambingan bridge is. Anyone who crosses Lambingan bridge on a regular basis may find a spark of recognition in that painting, and even the semi-domed building in the distance may of late still be standing, though of course now dwarfed by higher, more corporate structures of steel and possible progress.

Has Sta. Ana changed much since the time of dela Rosa? That the river was much cleaner during the turn of the 19th into 20th century is a given, and undoubtedly there weren’t many jeeps around then. The suffused, slightly overcast light in the painting may not be due to the presence of smoke belchers but a kind of hiatus or break in the clouds of the artist’s imagination, with the river telling a tale of its own in the late afternoon which only the painter could hear.

Another painting in the same vein is “Portrait of a Woman from Sta. Ana,” the subject with a smile which, to paraphrase a line from Neruda, only her mirror could see. The woman must be in her 20s or at most early 30s, probably upper middle class, dressed in the formal look of the time. She could be a piano instructor at a girls’ school or a classroom maestra in a public school that might be the Sta. Ana Elementary and High School, off Syquia road and the ubiquitous images of Our Lady of the Abandoned recurring in impromptu grottos in the area.

The woman is conservative, maybe about to go to church or step outdoors for an afternoon paseo, or go to a residence of a student for piano lessons.

She could resemble the face of Our Lady of the Abandoned, if we so much as had the time and wherewithal to get a closer look at her statue now on the facade of Sta. Ana church fronting Plaza Calderon, which the jeepney drivers plying the Pedro Gil route never fail to pay tribute to with a quick sign of the cross whenever they pass by the icon abandoned by everyone but their smoke belching engines.

Would not the painter Dela Rosa have loved to put on canvas our lady as she stands now in her blue studded dress, the lights playing tricks on her garments as if they were studded with jewels?

Or hovering just above her the moss covered belfry, a painting of which (though not likely by Dela Rosa) hangs in a room at the Kidney Center in Quezon City, the selfsame room where years ago another national artist, this time for literature, slowly died.

What would Dela Rosa have painted of Sta. Ana if he were alive today?

Quite possibly Plaza Calderon with its hustle and bustle and string of shops, restaurants, marketplace habitués in a hurry going nowhere. The ihaw-ihaws and the smoke coming from them entering the nostrils of the statue Calderon himself, obscure hero of history.

Even the facade of the police precinct beside the church, the fluorescent overhead in the nearby gymnasium, the children playing patintero in a stretch of street not spared by available moonlight.

Or the abandoned building behind the St. Francis school, now overgrown with weeds and vines beside the maternity clinic, right beside Kalye Begonia that is like a noble alley of sleepwalkers.

The endless diggings along Pedro Gil, the detours and if colors could capture it, the assaulting sound of machines drilling through asphalt and concrete.

The Lamayan district that constituted a wise detour when the main routes were clogged with traffic, passing by that semi-domed rundown hut which could have been in the original painting.

Then further down, and this could well be unavoidable, Lambingan itself, in the dark now spanning the river view of the painter’s beloved district of Sta. Ana, the street lamps perpetually busted and down the curve, the multicolored clown-like barker for jeeps about to depart.

If the painter Dela Rosa would look down the river in the year 2008 he would see an amalgamation of water lilies and other green stuff floating in the current, a few children bathing and one or two doing daredevil dives from an elevated portion, the splash of water reaching his palette.

He would mix the brackish water with the colors that would fill the canvas of a new landscape, Manila in another century, Sta. Ana like the smell of old wooden cabinets and musty clothing, which a forgotten piano teacher takes out to dust off the moths and wear to a paseo, an afternoon lesson with a student, or a date with a fellow abandonado in the church of our beloved, deserted lady.