A saxophone homage to a grand old man of painting
A grand Amorsolo festival had various art institutions in Manila honoring Fernando Amorsolo in their own special ways. We failed to catch all the exhibits because we had too many things on our hands in our much too short Manila interlude. But we did make it to the opening of the Ayala Museum's Amorsolo show. Unfortunately in these modern times one is not allowed to photograph the paintings on exhibit so all I can offer are shadowy, grainy available light images of the posh event. I was asked to give a brief talk so I append what I said at the end of this blog. As I walked through those Amorsolo paintings, my boyhood flashed past my eyes.
Someone managed to unearthed my old monograph on Amorsolo published in 1975 by Filipinas Foundation (Ayala) and launched at the time at the old Ayala Museum.
Don Jaime Zobel delivers the main address
Among the guests, Cesar Virata and Beniting Legarda
Jaime Zobel showers rose petals on spectators
Two familiar faces at the reception
A quick TV interview during the reception
Brief remarks on the launch of Amorsolo Exhibit
Ayala Museum: Oct. 23, 2008
REMEMBERING AMORSOLOHis sala was his studio. I looked around me. Standing on two or three easels were paintings—mostly portraits—in various stages of completion. My father Rafael Roces turned and introduced me to Don Fernando. He greeted me quietly. He looked at me with a hint of a smile.
Both my father and Don Fernando were in their late 60’s then. I felt privileged that my father had escorted me personally to meet the master painter. At that time this old fashioned graciousness of both my father’s and Don Fernando’s was already a vanished world that to this day hangs like an Amorsolo landscape in my gallery of memories.
I cannot honestly say I knew Don Fernando intimately. In Don Fernando’s day, a young man in his early twenties knew his place before an old gentleman. So he was always Don Fernando, and I was always the Spanish “usted” or the Tagalog “po”.
In one interview with painter Vicente Manansala, he observed to me that as a student under Don Fernando, the maestro would always address his pupils with the respectful Tagalog : “po”. And he would phrase his critique with the gentle “Tila po eto ay ganito…” In effect he would strive to point out the student’s flaws —say in color or line— by commenting softly “I seems to me sir, that the color or shape should be like this”.
The gentleness you see in his many popular paintings are very much the gentleness and courtly manners of the man. I recall one occasion when I had interviewed him for a short essay on his drawings—I think it was for the Saturday Mirror Magazine— and he lent me a batch of drawings for publication with the article. I of course made sure the drawings were not damaged by the magazine staff while in production, and I chased up the safe return of these drawings. In those days, many an artwork would be swallowed up in the bowels of the media never to surface. Ang Kiu Kok complained to me once that he never retrieved all the drawings featured on an entire book of his drawings. So, having safely husbanded Amoroslo’s drawings, I revisited him to return them. He seemed surprised that I was returning them. “No” he said, with a wave of his hand, “you can have them”. But because I considered these works much too valuable, I declined his generous offer saying: “Don Fernando, these are too valuable.”
I see you are looking at me as if I were some kind of idiot. You are thinking that I should have grabbed the drawings and run. Well, nobody is perfect. In any case, Don Fernando looked at me and said: “Come back next week I will have something for you”. When I returned he quietly presented me with a set of sketches and studies in pencil that he had carefully selected representing various periods of his career. So you see the Old World manners that my father taught me was rewarded with the same Old World coin.
Don Fernando enjoyed outings with his colleagues among them my first art mentor Dominador Castañeda, and they would paint in pleine aire much like the French Impressionists and Luna and Hidalgo had done. I have been told that on those outings with fellow artists, Amorsolo enjoyed visiting fruit stalls and flirting with the maidens minding these stalls.
Once, during World War II, my father found himself seated beside Don Fernando in a streetcar and he watched the artist whip out a sketchbook and quickly jot down the features of the streetcar conductor. My father was impressed by how quickly and surely he captured the likeness with a few strokes. Clearly, the immediate world around Amorsolo was material for his art.
The physical and cultural landscapes Don Fernando frequented, paint-brush in hand, have now vanished. It is an era I profoundly miss, for it was also my father’s universe.
When I look at Amorsolo’s paintings, as I now try to rummage through my bodega of memories a good 55 years back in time, I see my father and Don Fernando chatting somewhere in the shadows of the past, a season when courtesy and civility, when delicadeza and palabra de honor, were the personal and social codes one lived by.
We live in different times.
Buenas tardes, Don Fernando; magandang hapon sa mga kaibigan at tagahanga ni Amorsolo; good evening and God bless.
Amorsolo Revisited
