WALA LANG
There are no ancient tattoo samples but there are thousand-year-old clay pots and 19th century coconut shell tabó with designs telling the same story: Pinoys like to embellish things, to live with artistry.
In Taguig’s BGC, at the glass-walled lobby of a building that itself is an art work, is a conversation between ancient and modern Filipino artists. The ancients’ master works are on bamboo, clay, carabao horn, cloth, shell while our fellows’ ideas are on paper.
The exhibit, “Details and Abstractions,” brings together ethnographic objects and prints from the collection of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and invites strollers on 30th Street and 5th Avenue, to enter and see beauty in the objects that Filipinos have used in their everyday lives and how they might do the same in the high rises and cubbyholes many live and work in today.
THE CCP VISUAL ARTS AND MUSEUM DIVISION From left: Noeny Gatarin-Dimaranan, Mercedes Tolentino, Rica Estrada, Adonis Reuel Enciso
No dark suits with two or three layers of underclothing for indigenous peoples. It was bright colors, geometric designs in contrasting colors, elaborate embroidery for them, matched with strings of colored beads, large mother-of-pearl shells, joyful sounding bells.
Mountain communities had neither piano nor harp, they had decorated gongs held up by carefully sculpted handles. They made music, courted, with nose flutes that were bamboo tubes with finger holes, in delicate shapes. The kubing, our equivalent of a Jew’s harp, is a thin bamboo segment held between the teeth with bristles that are plucked. Both are fashioned in artistic shapes enriched with lines and figures incised and highlighted in black.
Pots, offering dishes, ritual objects, baskets, lime containers for chews, food containers, all had surfaces decorated with etchings, incisions, carvings. Colored stones, glass, and shells were fashioned into jewelry. Men and women decorated themselves with tattoos. Spanish explorers did not call some of us “pintados” for nothing.
Today’s homes and daily lives, in contact, are colorless. Many go home to cramped studios and townhouses with featureless walls painted white. We now dress alike, if not in office uniforms, then in jeans and T-shirts. Our lunch baons are in plastic containers, in brown cartons if we’re having pizza delivered. Cooking is on-store bought appliances.
I brightened up my graduate school dorm room with posters, mostly Toulouse-Lautrec repros of Moulin Rouge and La Goulou. Unfortunately I had not heard of the alternative now offered by the CCP exhibit, for young people living on their own, to brighten up their pads with things of beauty, art that will not wreck their pockets and indeed will appreciate in value.
EXHIBIT DESIGNER Orlando Jarme, Jr.
The simplest and earliest prints are woodcuts, made by pressing on paper a smooth piece of wood with a design carved by the artist. More elaborate is one printed with a metal sheet that has been etched. Ink is applied and the resulting paper impression is the shape or design that was etched and therefore was not inked. Another process enables the ink to remain only on the etched design. A print with different colors is made with multiple inking and pressing. There are numerous techniques, each requiring artistry and careful processing. The same plate or plates can be used in multiple pressings, but each one is an original, being the product of a separate artistic effort and not uncaringly repeatedly by a machine.
The CCP has collected works on paper that are among the best that have been produced by our artists. In the exhibit are pieces by the pioneering Manuel Rodriguez Sr., known as the “Father of Philippine Printmaking,” Fernando Zobel, Juvenal Sanso, Jose Joya, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and by top contemporary artists who both paint in oil and acrylic and who are in printmaking like Raul Isidro and Lito Carating.
OPERATIC Michelle Nikki Junia singing Gaano Kita Kamahal and a PPO string ensemble.
The exhibit was conceptualized, designed, and mounted by the visual arts department of the CCP and opened last Friday with Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano present. It was an event that was itself an artistic happening. A Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra string ensemble played, CCP trustee, and operatic singer Michelle Nikki Junia sang western and Filipino classics.
Notes: (a) The exhibit is at Arthaland Century Pacific Tower, BGC between 5th and 4th Avenues on 30th Street; and (b) The CCP is headed by Jaime C. Laya, chairman, and Margie Moran Floirendo, president. Arthaland is headed by vice chairman and CEO Jaime Gonzalez.
Comments are cordially invited, addressed to [email protected].
THE CCP VISUAL ARTS AND MUSEUM DIVISION From left: Noeny Gatarin-Dimaranan, Mercedes Tolentino, Rica Estrada, Adonis Reuel Enciso
No dark suits with two or three layers of underclothing for indigenous peoples. It was bright colors, geometric designs in contrasting colors, elaborate embroidery for them, matched with strings of colored beads, large mother-of-pearl shells, joyful sounding bells.
Mountain communities had neither piano nor harp, they had decorated gongs held up by carefully sculpted handles. They made music, courted, with nose flutes that were bamboo tubes with finger holes, in delicate shapes. The kubing, our equivalent of a Jew’s harp, is a thin bamboo segment held between the teeth with bristles that are plucked. Both are fashioned in artistic shapes enriched with lines and figures incised and highlighted in black.
Pots, offering dishes, ritual objects, baskets, lime containers for chews, food containers, all had surfaces decorated with etchings, incisions, carvings. Colored stones, glass, and shells were fashioned into jewelry. Men and women decorated themselves with tattoos. Spanish explorers did not call some of us “pintados” for nothing.
Today’s homes and daily lives, in contact, are colorless. Many go home to cramped studios and townhouses with featureless walls painted white. We now dress alike, if not in office uniforms, then in jeans and T-shirts. Our lunch baons are in plastic containers, in brown cartons if we’re having pizza delivered. Cooking is on-store bought appliances.
I brightened up my graduate school dorm room with posters, mostly Toulouse-Lautrec repros of Moulin Rouge and La Goulou. Unfortunately I had not heard of the alternative now offered by the CCP exhibit, for young people living on their own, to brighten up their pads with things of beauty, art that will not wreck their pockets and indeed will appreciate in value.
EXHIBIT DESIGNER Orlando Jarme, Jr.
The simplest and earliest prints are woodcuts, made by pressing on paper a smooth piece of wood with a design carved by the artist. More elaborate is one printed with a metal sheet that has been etched. Ink is applied and the resulting paper impression is the shape or design that was etched and therefore was not inked. Another process enables the ink to remain only on the etched design. A print with different colors is made with multiple inking and pressing. There are numerous techniques, each requiring artistry and careful processing. The same plate or plates can be used in multiple pressings, but each one is an original, being the product of a separate artistic effort and not uncaringly repeatedly by a machine.
The CCP has collected works on paper that are among the best that have been produced by our artists. In the exhibit are pieces by the pioneering Manuel Rodriguez Sr., known as the “Father of Philippine Printmaking,” Fernando Zobel, Juvenal Sanso, Jose Joya, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and by top contemporary artists who both paint in oil and acrylic and who are in printmaking like Raul Isidro and Lito Carating.
OPERATIC Michelle Nikki Junia singing Gaano Kita Kamahal and a PPO string ensemble.
The exhibit was conceptualized, designed, and mounted by the visual arts department of the CCP and opened last Friday with Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano present. It was an event that was itself an artistic happening. A Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra string ensemble played, CCP trustee, and operatic singer Michelle Nikki Junia sang western and Filipino classics.
Notes: (a) The exhibit is at Arthaland Century Pacific Tower, BGC between 5th and 4th Avenues on 30th Street; and (b) The CCP is headed by Jaime C. Laya, chairman, and Margie Moran Floirendo, president. Arthaland is headed by vice chairman and CEO Jaime Gonzalez.
Comments are cordially invited, addressed to [email protected].