Composed with our blood and tears.
Life is a song ever being sung,
Whose endnote can never be found. – Anonymous
The world of James Onglepho is a world of light, of whiteness and clarity. The lighting is soft but constant, the weather always mild. Here exists no stark shadows or sharp contrasts. Here is the mind of Buddha. A space that is in the world but not of it. Here is tranquility beyond mortal strife. In this space of translucence, James produces some 60 paintings a year, mostly landscapes, lotuses and other flowers.
Onglepho’s workshop can easily be mistaken for a doctor’s or a dentist’s clinic. Located at the back of his residence in Quezon City, it has been his main work area since 1978. The walls, panels and drawers are painted immaculate white: antiseptic and unblemished. James says that white adds space and gives him a sense of serenity. Nothing distracts him while he is mixing pigments. When painting, James shuts the curtain glass gate and switches on four 40-watt fluorescent lights to simulate natural light. Except when doing big paintings, James always paints from a sitting position, even designing his own easel and painting chair which allows him adequate movement.
Filed away inside the countless drawers are brushes, newspaper articles, drawings, 2,000 books, over a thousand folders, more than 300 cassette tapes and sundry materials, which James has written about over the past four decades. He knows where everything is.
The only non-white object inside his studio is a videoke system. Music, classical as well as popular, often fills the room. Singing provides a respite from work, and he always paints landscapes with the background music of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and the voices of tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo can be heard across the room. He says that the rhythm of classical music inspires a sense of large space and vitality. When painting flowers, he listens to sentimental music because it moves him to meditation. He also loves listening to classical Chinese music and Philippine folk music.
Onglepho’s day begins early. After breakfast, he prepares a cup of jasmine tea, and is in his studio working by nine. His four children are all grown up and there is little to distract James these days from painting. He spends most of his days and nights inside his studio. Here he paints, relaxes and even sleeps. It is in his "little world," that spends at least 18 hours a day there.
As much as his works exude serenity, Onglepho’s own life and times were fraught with the pain and difficulties of the first-generation immigrant. He was born in Xiamen, China in 1931. It was an era of great changes and social unrest in the "Middle Kingdom." The last empire had fallen, but the republic was still unstable. In 1937, Japan invaded China. A year later, James and his father left for Hong Kong. In 1939, they joined their relatives in Zamboanga. They moved to Manila when his father became the principal of the Paco Chinese Elementary School, where James also studied. James’ mother died in Xiamen, China in 1940. Two years later, James’ father re-married. The Onglephos went through great difficulty during the war but they rose to the challenge and survived. After the war, in April 1946, James’ father died, shortly after going back to Xiamen to recuperate from an illness.
The family moved back to Zamboanga in 1948, where James, at 17, began to cultivate an interest in the arts. His stepmother, Carmen Ong Lim, was appointed dean of discipline at the Zamboanga Chinese High School. James studied painting and Chinese calligraphy, which he learned from his father. He was into photography, too, submitting photographs to a Hong Kong-based magazine. He also wrote poetry and fiction for Chinese language dailies in Manila.
James got married in 1951, but three years later, he made a very crucial decision. Equipped only with native talent and a burning desire to paint, James left behind a teaching job in Zamboanga to come to Manila, and study at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Santo Tomas.
There, James studied under Prof. Victorio Edades, who would later become National Artist. Under Edades, he learned the rudiments of life painting. James remembers his first week in class: He did not know the first thing about life painting, and was keen to hide his ignorance from his classmates. Sensing Onglepho’s discomfort, Edades approached James and explained to the young student the basics of sketching human form and color mixing. The old maestro’s patience paid off and James painted his first oil portrait right there and then. James studied landscape painting under Gabriel Custodio, from whom he learned techniques that could not have been taught in art schools. Thus, Edades and Custodio were James’ major influences.
In 1955, during his second year at the UST, Onglepho’s "Vista Por La Noche" was cited for a special prize at the National Student Painting Competition sponsored by the Shell Co. The following year, his entry failed to win any prize but was purchased by then British Ambassador to the Philippines, George Clauton. It was his first sale.
By 1958, James and some of his schoolmates decided that they had learned as much from art school as they could and decided to quit school to work on their own. James returned to Mindanao and came back to Manila in 1959 with 20 landscape paintings for his first solo exhibit at the China Art Gallery of the Manila Hotel. The art market, though, had yet to bloom, and James had to do something else besides painting. He returned briefly to Zamboanga to teach. In 1964, while relaxing at the city’s Pasonanca Park one afternoon, James chanced upon a lotus pond. Fascinated and entranced by the sight, he decided to paint the flower.
For more than 30 years, James painted lotuses. No other Filipino artist has displayed such fidelity to one subject matter as he did. To the artist, the lotus is more than just a flower, more than the subject of half a lifetime’s meditation. It is the quintessence of purity, the flower symbolizes all that is unsullied and noble in nature as in the human spirit. Onglepho’s long-running affair with the lotus could easily be rooted in his Chinese heritage, but their relationship is something deeper.
"No two views of the same lotus can ever be the same," Onglepho says. "Its colors are constantly changing. The lotus unfolds from a deep red to a brilliant white. The years I have spent observing and painting the flower just kept me going."
Besides its color and shape, James loves the lotus for its symbolic value. The lotus is a flower that grows in mud, yet maintains its purity and dignity. This quality of the flower has earned it a special niche in Chinese thought and aesthetics – "The gentleman among flowers."
Onglepho’s work has often been cited for its blending of the influences of the East and the West. Indeed, few others, if any, have done lotuses using oil rather than ink or watercolor. James says that he always tries to retain the simplicity and subtlety of Eastern art, while constantly experimenting with oil. His ability to blend different traditions is founded on his understanding of both Oriental and Western art. Besides being a painter, James is an accomplished art scholar, having published a number of treatises on Chinese art, including the Art of Ling-nan Group.
Like the lotus, Onglepho is just as open to change. His early lotuses simulated the effects of watercolor using oil, rich in color and texture. He explains that he was unconsciously influenced by the old masters’ Chinese paintings, then tending to apply darker tones. This, he says, gave his early lotuses a "depressed" feeling. In his 1977 exhibit at the Hyatt Regency in Manila, Onglepho discarded black hues for more transparent colors.
Meanwhile, his early landscapes betray a robust and vigorous mixture of brushstrokes and bold colors. With age came the search for subtlety and refinement, a longing for life’s more enduring qualities. In the ’80s, Onglepho’s works exuded confidence and maturity.
The ’90s have witnessed a new phase in Onglepho’s career. In 1994, he found a venue at Asia Art Gallery, where he holds one-man shows every year. Lotuses have taken a backseat as a hundred other flowers bloomed. James, inspired by the flowers that he sees when he travels, draws mainly from memory and imagination. He has also dramatically transformed the way we view landscapes. He paints not only the mountain’s surface form but also abstract shapes to express the feeling of light falling on the mountain. Using the "multiple vanishing point" perspective and exaggeration of form, Onglepho fully expresses the inner beauty of his subject matter – man and nature coming together.
His 21st one-man exhibit, held at the Asia Art Gallery, Nov. 8 to 20, 2001, represented not only an expansion of subject matter but also a broadening in composition. Where single flowers used to inhabit wide-open spaces, James’ new works display more compactness and density. Where his colors tended towards lightness, the shades have now deepened.
"I am a simple person," says Onglepho, "who has chosen a life that offers a universe of possibilities." Life as art, he muses, is a long-winding journey, a pilgrimage, that often takes one across rough seas. "A mountain leads to another, one river opens up to a new stream." In the end, sums up the artist, every life finds its own expressive form through all the darkness and solitude. We are all dependent on the kindness of strangers, Onglepho reflects, and there is little that one can lay claim to, or take pride in, except the unflinching pursuit of a dream.