Thanks and praise

This week I’m going to hand out some thanks and praise to friends old and new who have done something good not just to me and for themselves, but to others who might also enjoy and benefit from their creative work.

I’m happy to report that my call for help for Rogelio Bibal  the Baguio-based artist who has done some pioneering work propagating monopodial bamboo up north  received a positive response from Edgar Manda, administrator of the Laguna Lake Authority and another bamboo enthusiast. Manda and his associates have offered to shoulder part of the expenses Rogelio will incur in attending an important bamboo conference in China later this month, in exchange for a report on his bamboo propagation work. It’s as fair an exchange as you could imagine, and my congratulations to both parties for cooperating on behalf of a valuable natural resource. So thank you, Ed Manda and the Philippine Bamboo Foundation, for your support.

My thanks also go to a friend named Eduardo “Ditto” Lesaca, an entrepreneur and businessman who also happens to be a great cook  particularly of paella, that Spanish rice, seafood, and chicken wonder that never fails to lift up the spirits and fill the stomach. In this case, the spirits and the stomach were mine; both were seriously depressed, as I was laid up with arthritis. Ditto sent over a large pan of his paella, which didn’t last a day, with the whole family plunging into the feast.

I e-mailed Ditto to ask him how he got into the paella business and why his paella was so good, and this is what he e-mailed me back:

“The paella recipe comes from my maternal grandfather, the late Alfredo Guidote. He passed the recipe to his daughter  my mother, Carmen ‘Mita’ Guidote Lesaca. One day, after years of eating the paella cooked by my Lolo Freddy and eventually my mother, it dawned on me that my mother is going to pass away one day just as her father did. I didn’t want the recipe to disappear and get stuck going to Spanish restaurants for commercial paella, so I decided I had to learn Lolo Freddy’s paella.

A painting by Migs Villanueva

“My mother taught me the recipe and as soon as I knew it by heart, I decided that I would do what my mother and grandfather never did, which was to make the paella available for sale to the public. Moreover, to distinguish my paella from all the others on the market, I decided to give my potential patrons excellent value for their money by overloading my Paella with much more of all the condiments that everybody wishes there was more of in commercial restaurant-made paella. With my Paella Valenciana, you will not even see the rice until you break through all the tiger prawns, chicken, squid, clams and chorizo.”

Ditto says that it took a while for his paella to catch on because it’s not cheap. But word of a good thing always gets around, and soon he had his hands full filling orders, particularly during the Christmas season, when he needs at least two weeks’ advance notice. He buys ingredients fresh from the market on the same day they’re cooked, and requires a 50-percent down payment to confirm the order.

If you want to taste the Ditto difference for yourself, give him a call at 0918-9634886.

Finally, congratulations to someone best described as an ambidextrous artist, a former creative writing student of mine, a Palanca-prizewinning fictionist who’s also a talented painter and a leading member of the Saturday Group of Artists. I hadn’t seen or heard from Socorro “Migs” Villanueva in a long while so I was pleasantly surprised to get a message from her announcing her first one-woman show, opening on Sept. 21 at Galerie Francesca at the Festival Mall in Alabang.

Migs’ show will focus on a subject close to her heart: children. She had always been interested in children  having four of her own  but her painting took a long detour into non-representational art before an incident brought her back to them:

“In 2009, while caught in traffic, I witnessed a scene involving street kids along Shaw Boulevard. Boys and girls clutching rugby in plastic containers were in a cat-and-mouse chase with security guards from the surrounding buildings. The hardness I saw in their eyes  and all other emotions I felt within me  gave me the conviction to paint kids again. I painted Shaw Kids that week. The artwork was so well received that I took that as a sign that this is my access: access to my own voice, as well as my access, as an artist, to an audience.”

The abstractions she used to worked with, she says, remain in her current collection. “I like it that even as I am making representations of children now, my work still has the look or sense of the abstract. I seldom render kids in action, although I get a lot of requests for that. Sometimes, I make them dance, or pose in a cutesy way. But for the most part my kids are like deer in headlights.”

Children, she says, “Represent a pure a state of mind so that in my artworks children are seldom seen in action, like playing, or running, as children are often rendered. They are often just standing and looking straight at the viewer. Children playing tag will be seen as children playing tag, and not much else. Make them stand there vulnerable, open, and you have a world of interpretations and readings; they become like a door that leads the viewer into his/her own world.”

Migs cites the Saturday Group icon Malang as a major influence in her work, even as she dreams of “being like a Cy Twombly, a Richard Prince or an Antoni Tapies, or a Lao Lianben, or a muted Basquiat. You know what I like in those artists? They don’t seem to take themselves or their art too seriously, but they are taken seriously.”

Her two callings  writing and painting  may contend in her, but Migs says “One informs the other. My stories  I’d like to think  are an investigation of psyche and character. I like to reach really deep into the heart of my audience; I want to say, ‘Isn’t that how it is?’ I go for the same effect whether I paint or write.”

And now we await Socorro Villanueva’s first book of stories.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.