McSketches and shaman wars

I’ve just addressed a couple of requests from artist-friends for token prose inputs for books. Might as well share them here, in advance of intended publication.

The first is a brief appreciation, or one might call it an intro, for a modest book of immodest sketches that my buddy Rod Samonte is having printed on demand in time to cart home by next week for an upcoming exhibit.

Here it is:

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Morning sketches will never be the same again, not after California-based Filipino artist Rodolfo Samonte institutionalized a curious ritual of creativity over cups of McDonald’s coffee.

Almost daily, he sketches dozens of nudes on table napkins at a Burbank “McDo,” where he plants himself for a couple of hours each morning — not exactly doodling, a therapeutic pastime for many people, even while they find themselves in public places — but creating art that deserves to be shared via exhibition in a gallery.

That’s exactly what Rod will be doing, very soon. Early in February he comes home as yet another balikbayan, and mounts a show of over a hundred of his “McSketches” at Ross Capili’s Art Prints Alley in LRI Design Plaza on Nicanor Garcia St. (formerly Reposo) in Makati.

The show was arranged as early as midyear last when Rod started posting his McSketches on FB, mostly in the Banggaan e-loop shared by a score of Pinoy artists, photographers, journalists and poets in Manila, Singapore, Sydney, and the USA. 

Everyone was titillated by the idea of engaging in public cum pubic napkin art — surely a first in the annals of lechery, uhh, I mean laudation of the female form.

Whether it has anything to do with libido sparked by imagination or desperation is a moot question, not just because the artist is well past being a sexagenarian. He is also very happily married. And Rodolfo Samonte comes pedigreed.

Before he moved to the U.S. in 1979, he had gained a sterling reputation as a printmaker in Manila, pioneering in silkscreen art and winning major prizes in the print category of the Art Association of the Philippines’ (AAP’s) annual competition.

Creative restlessness and travel abroad fueled frequent experimentation. After learning paper-making in Japan, he acquired rag-paper in Paris, stuffed this in an Osterizer, and poured the blend on large rubber sheets layered with geometric shapes, thus thickening his works and achieving depth and sculptural qualities.

Samonte’s geometric abstractions became even more colorful and glossy, with stronger bas relief, when he introduced the technique of spraying automotive lacquer paint. He even included his second-hand Vauxhall as a canvas, changing its riot of colors every year. A well-received show in Manila’s prestigious Luz Gallery led to exhibits in Colombia, Holland and Japan.

Upon migration, Rod worked for various advertising agencies in the U.S. as he had in Manila, until he launched himself as an independent full-time artist in 1998. 

Of late, digital art has become his field of play. He prints his computer-aided geometric abstractions on cotton duck canvas. He’s joined an LA-based art group, Lanterns of the East, where he’s the only one who’s into digital art, which he says “is the future.” They mount shows in their own gallery in downtown LA, and also exhibit yearly in Barnsdall Art Park on Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont and the Brand Library’s Gallery in Glendale.

Rod is also an accomplished photographer. On a visit to Manila in 2010, he became fascinated with the urban phenomenon that is the omnipresent security guard. Locally called “sikyu,” uniformed and armed men and women of private security agencies stand guard at the entrances to residential areas, buildings, banks, malls and commercial strips. He took portraits of these “Sikyu” and painted over the photoshopped images for a unique exhibit.

In 2011, he exhibited large specimens of his mesmerizing digital art at Capili’s One Workshop main gallery. Now, barely two years later, representing a refreshing change of pace would be his  novel genre-works, starkly simple as they are simply stark. Back to the sexy basics, as it were.

While Samonte occasionally participates in live nude painting sessions, it is his persistent memory of the female form that is challenged in his morning coffee ritual that has produced countless McSketches.

That Burbank McDo might as well prepare to set up a commemorative plaque on one of its walls, where perchance Rodolfo Samonte projects the neo-mythic poses that border on the flagrant before he commits these to paper. Paper napkins, that is, with their ridges and folds, their own barely discernible nipples.

In conscious, conscientious irony, Rod utilizes strong lines and skillful shading to highlight provocative delights: sumptuous breasts, soft curves, strong haunches, daunting derrieres, cute belly-buttons and more than just suggested slits. The figures range from slim and svelte to robust and voluptuous — modern-day Botticellis in bodacious nakedest form, so that any gentle slide of that napkin might fulfill our sudden yen for motion, as of twerking.

Once again Rodolfo Samonte has tweaked his art. With the morning need for coffee, the availability of McDonald’s napkins, pen and ink, and an insatiable imagination, he has created providential nude sketches that are all of sui generis. 

No, we dare not thumb or blow our noses at this one-of-a-kind art, especially since it suggests veneration of the mons veneris over no less and no later than breakfast. 

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The next brief input was the result of meeting up with Kawayan de Guia and Frank Cimatu at the Singapore Biennale some months back. The Baguio hitmen let on that they would be doing a book much like an encyclopedia. Except that they’d call it “Uncyclopedia to Art, Life and Living in Baguio and the Cordilleras.”

They demanded a contribution. It came with a threat. If I proved recalcitrant, why, they’d spread the canard (even put it in the book) that I was the first human to bring cannabis seeds up to Baguio, even before the Second World War!

Now you understand why I have to escape that fate of datedness. So here’s complying with the unveiled, rather ham-fisted request to come up with a bit of recollection — on how a funky bohemian group shot and produced an indie film in Baguio in the early ’80s.

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The indie venture was titled Shaman Wars. It starred three of our friends as the macho protagonists battling over an a-go-go dancer in one of Baguio’s infamous girlie bars at that time. Was it Nevada? Something like that. This was in 1981 or ’82 or ’83.

Our action stars were Eric de Guia (a.k.a. Kidlat Tahimik, the great-grandfather of Philippine independent cinema himself!), Pepito Bosch the “Ermita outlaw,” and the inscrutable Boy Yuchengco. 

Boy Yñiguez served as the cinematographer, working with a 16mm Arriflex if memory serves me right. I guess that’s how Boyñi first earned his spurs that had him galloping away with cinematography honors in decades to come, including last year’s award for Mike Alcazaren’s Puti.

Soundman was Ruben Domingo, who later in that decade moved on to Hollywood. I last saw him in LA in 2000. He still had long, silky black hair that he often tossed away from his earplugs.

I was story consultant, faux direk, and propsman. I took care of Pepito’s and Boyu’s stashes of whatever. I also dispensed the necessary ablutions whenever I felt that they would do no damage to creative equilibrium.

Oh, and I also headed the crowd control crew, especially when we shot at that Nevada girlie bar.

The object of lust that sparked the shaman wars, I forget her name now, or her age. Either 19 or 20, if I’m not doddering along significantly. We asked her to allow her act onstage, which was basically shimmying around to the music of Abba I think,  while in tasselled bikini top and bikini bottom, to be filmed. For the sake of art. And for more than just the usual table fee, of course.

And of course we also asked permission from the mama-sans and bouncers. We passed around a lot of Ginebra bilogs, even among the leering cowboys around the raucous tables, just so they kept their remarks on the clean side of Cordilleran appreciation. 

We also shot our “shamans” in various corners of that girlie bar, in various states of manly appreciation of the girl’s gyrations. Kidlat was of course more naked than the girl, clad only in trad loincloth. He was the local shaman. Pepito was all in black, with a black hat, too. He was the Western shaman. Boyu was in his kung-fu outfit, as the celestial shaman.

We shot scenes at Wright Park and that gazebo with cement pillars, and I think also at the amphitheater in John Hay. Each protagonist displayed magical skills and tricks as they cavorted athletically amid the colonial architecture and greenery.

It was a lot of fun. A lot of laughs. One evening we even took the girl to a cottage off the Country Club, fed her an elegant dinner, and had her pose with us all reclining before the lit fireplace.

I’m not sure now if we still shot her, outside the Nevada club, that is. Maybe some close-ups. Or did we have her hold and lash out with a whip at Pepito, who in one vintage still I saw recently appeared to be strapped horizontally before that same fireplace?

A pity I lost both the Betamax and VHS copies I had of that indie film that ran 15 minutes, I think. It won the Best Experimental Film award at the ECP (Experimental Cinema of the Philippines) contest later that year. Yes, Shaman Wars did. Thanks to its magnificent action and acting, its cinematography, its brisk editing (which might have been a collab among Boyñi, Ruben and me, and just about everyone else), the nubile pulchritude of the female star, and of course all of the metaphysical questions it provoked with the supernatural display of inherent spiritual prowess that had the stuntmen-actors typecast to begin with.

If anyone has a copy of Shaman Wars, I’d like to see it again, after being crazy all these years. It could be our only hope for sanity in these mundanely war-mongering times.