These paintings speak of mountains

With the mountains far removed from this lowland existence it was a welcome respite to visit Baguio again after more than a decade for the Shell Art Interaction in line with the fuel company’s annual National Students Art Competition, now in its 46th year.

The media familiarization tour would take the group of art writers to the famed BenCab Museum in Tuba, Benguet on the first Friday of May, thereafter interview the National Artist himself who was a second place winner in the 1962 competition. In the afternoon was scheduled a workshop conducted by painter Ato Habulan, a judge in the competition and regular contributor to the interaction series.

Midway through the trip north on the first Thursday of May, there was a stopover for lunch at Abe’s Farm in Pampanga, an old ancestral house refurbished into a homey restaurant, that served specialties of the Larry Cruz chain of restaurants in Manila: binukadkad na plapla with burong hipon, crispy tadyang, tasty pusit, bulalo, gising gising, an adobo of some gamey animal (usa or baboy damo) and mounds of steaming rice. There were some old pictures and portraits of and by the late writer E. Aguilar Cruz and family, worthy prologue to this art excursion.

The next day BenCab was his usual reticent self though no less helpful in the semi-press conference and roundtable discussion at his museum, with talk around the long table in Café Sabel ranging from his beginnings in the art world to his time in Europe and working for the magazines, the number of galleries that could be counted on the fingers of one hand in the ’60s, his fondness for the indigenous and tribal as seen in the omnipresent bul-ols and other ancient figures that inhabit his surroundings like guardian angels.

The piece was titled “Blue Serenity,” described as a “surrealistic depiction of a shanty scene,” that won for BenCab the silver medal in the 12th edition of NSAC and a few hundred pesos, which prize money has since grown exponentially, as in the scores of thousands and in different categories too including digital.

The National Artist is not averse to next generation technology nor to any new innovative methods, indeed feels the need to collaborate with younger artists in order to be in touch with the current, though he admits that his roots are old school, honed on drawing and making studies and the slow maturation of the work.

He has never exhibited an unfinished work; unlike a piece of fiction that can be abandoned or a poem that explodes in your face, a painting itself must be complete or like any self-respecting work of art must be an addition to reality. Though that too is a pfennig for your thoughts, those blank spaces can be occasionally misconstrued as incomplete, verging on the minimal.

Sabel, yes, that’s another story. “Isn’t he the same guy who painted the Great Philippine Bibingka?” texted Cesar Ruiz from Dumaguete when told we were en route to the BenCab museum.

But not only bibingka for sure with its different, varied textures, but also something in the way the vagabond woman moves in the subconscious and landscape of collective memory, which BenCab returns to time and again whenever he is up against a blank wall or perchance, a blank, mute canvas crying for shapes and images and colors to be given life, even beyond life or our mortal grasp of it.

Presently BenCab is experimenting with metal sculpture, which affords him the chance to work with tinsmiths and other latero, a departure from the basically solitary mien of painting and printmaking.

He recalls with fondness his days at Liwayway and Sunday Times Magazine, when he did the illustrations, working alongside journalists A. Oliver Flores and Recah Trinidad, and a photographer who would later become one of the most sought-after cinematographers. BenCab has lost track of his drawings during this period.

How the art scene has changed since the time of his beginnings, he says, now the young and new artists can hold one-man shows and be sold out, yet there are constants — drawing without idea will hardly have a leg to stand on, while pure concept without representation is still searching for a compassionate audience.

Elements must be complementary for a subtler understanding of the human condition, but maybe this is just rambling, like the fog moving clockwork style into the patio in the afternoon during the workshop of Habulan and artist Tom with the media delegates and fine arts students from UP Baguio, as well some past winners of NSAC from UP, University of the East, Feati.

Habulan, a raconteur who can tell inexhaustible tales of the art world over rounds of beer, an energy mix of Pale, Negra and Lights, described the abstract method as “wet on wet,” meaning certain portions of the oslo paper are brushed with water, thereafter putting pinches of watercolors of one’s choice to let run over paper in an exercise of precognition.

If there’s a clip to go with this, which fortunately or unfortunately never came to pass with a flick of the video button on the trusty cellphone camera, it’s that of BenCab walking out to the backyard of the museum with three reporters, to show them the natural waterfalls in a section of mountain that serves as irrigation for the tomatoes, strawberries, assorted vegetables that grow on the land and are harvested for the Café Sabel menu.

In the rainy season, he says, the water gushes forth like a power mantra, watering everything in its path. Or this for live it: the erotica museum, which is what it was touted to be and more: bul-ols performing 69, women and nymphs in various stages of undress and/or ecstasy, countless positions of union that boggle the mind, or un-boggle it, for nowhere else in this museum is sex a meme unto itself.

On the last night of workshop interaction, after a hearty pizza and pasta dinner complete with folk-singing entertainers, there was a walk through a Burnham Park night market, a stroll up Session Road for nightcaps at Zola formerly Patria, thence to the Azalea residences where even the ghosts were cool and well rested and perhaps already waking to a life beyond life.

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And now a parting word from our sponsors: The Shell National Students Art Competition is a legacy program of Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp., a leading company in power, energy, and gas technology in the country. Shell believes that it has a role to play in nation building, sharing in every way to develop the potentials of the Filipino youths to become productive individuals while helping the country move towards progress.

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(Erratum for the Erehwon article: Dayang Yraola is an independent curator not an assistant at the UP Vargas Museum. Her transaction with Erehwon is limited to designing the curatorial program template. Our apologies).