Friendship By Bettina Olmedo

Three paintings that say, ‘I love you’ By Bettina Olmedo ORDINARY GUYS SAY IT with flowers and chocolates. Writers say it with love letters, while artists say it with paintings. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, many would agree that artists decidedly have an edge when it comes to expressing those three little words. This will be illustrated in a major exhibition to be mounted by the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Sept. 27-Nov. 8. This will be the first posthumous retrospective show on Onib Olmedo, a major Filipino figurative expressionist whose impact is felt even now. Filipino artists of a whole new generation are self-confessed Olmedo disciples. The exhibit will feature representative works produced by Olmedo spanning his entire professional career from 1971 till his death in 1996. Included are paintings and sketches from the private collection of Olmedo’s immediate family, some of which have never been exhibited in this country, including what has come to be known as the “Vienna Collection” and portraits of his widow and children which relate a love story in the language of art. Valentine’s Day portrait It was the summer of 1967. I was then immersed in the whirlwind world of advertising, writing copy designed to make consumers buy what companies felt they needed and wanted, in accordance with Pavlov’s hierarchy of human desires that fuel all of humankind’s behavior. The account executives were always impeccably attired in their business suits, while the copywriters exuded their angst in outfits that young people nowadays would describe as “cool.” I found the AEs too stuffy and plastic, and the copywriters just downright self-conscious and self-absorbed egotists. To my mind, not one of them could be considered by nubile, fresh graduates like me as “husband material.”

And then, one day, my friend, Fe Capellan, who was an AE but did not have the mindset of this advertising specimen, invited me to their family picnic at Hundred Islands in Pangasinan. And it was at that time that I met the guy with whom I was destined to share my life — Onib Olmedo. What made him so attractive was the fact that he was the very antithesis of all the people I was working with in advertising. When we got married, he decided that he had had enough of the structural discipline demanded by architecture, shifting gears in his career path by becoming an artist. However, he was not at all like the artists I had to collaborate with in the commercial world of advertising. His was a quiet intensity and the authenticity of a perfectly integrated human person. The paintings he produced were not the pretty, ornamental stuff that we had been superficially exposed to in our Humanities classes at St. Theresa’s. In fact, they were all distorted and utterly disturbing, such that Filipino art collectors would be puzzled, frightened and even repelled by them. This was in the swinging ’60s, when Filipinos had developed a taste only for the vibrant and colorful images of Philippine genre art depicting indigenous themes like town fiestas, planting and harvesting rituals, religious festivals and the folklore of a people who are perpetually smiling, although they may be weeping inside. It was, therefore, with a certain amount of trepidation that I unveiled the portrait he had painstakingly painted as a gift for our first Valentine’s Day celebration as a couple. To my surprise, what I saw was a portrait done in a purely realistic style. In fact, he said he had based it on one of my black-and-white photographs which he projected on the white wall of his studio for enlargement. All my artsy-fartsy friends tell me that I should hide this painting because it is not at all representative of his style. I ignore their comments, because I know that making an exception for his wife through a realistic portrait that does not distort her features is a figurative expressionist’s unique way of saying, “I love you”—

something which cannot be duplicated by the usual way of expressing those three little words. Daddy’s girl Like this portrait, there were two others he produced as an expression of love for the people who were nearest and dearest to his heart: our two daughters. Bambi, the older one, looks exactly like her father but is more like me in terms of personality traits - exuberant, ebullient, caring but also fiercely determined to stand up for her rights and convictions. Franjo took after her father, being kind, gentle, compassionate and generous to a fault. She was his alter ego. They were kindred spirits who spoke the same language. Of all the members of the huge Olmedo clan, Franjo is the only one who really understands and appreciates her father’s art. The two of them would spend hours discussing his paintings, the nuances of the distorted floor tiles, the chair intertwined with a girl, the haunting images on his canvas—with skeletal features and X-ray anatomies that brought the viewer into the dark recesses of tormented human souls. In stark contrast to these images is Onib’s portrait of her rendered in ink. It captures the sweet innocence and the magical, albeit fleeting, joys of adolescence. As in other signature Onib paintings, the eyes say it all—they have a look of softness and tenderness. In them are distilled the defining moments in a young girl’s life: the exciting but intimidating prospects of unknown territory represented by the first day in school; the jitters attending her first performance in a class play and her first un-chaperoned date at the junior-senior prom; the exhilaration of venturing into her first coed university after years of a cloistered existence at a convent school. The portrait exudes the shy but hopeful aura of youth looking into the future which holds the distant promise of dreams fulfilled and expectations realized. The portrait evokes happy memories of funny moments and momentous experiences—the way Onib would relate to his daughter his own, unique version of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, changing “Jack and the Beanstalk” to Jack and a can of Purefoods pork and

beans—a story that Franjo would adamantly adhere to, to the consternation of her teacher; the day he followed in the family car as Franjo drove off with her escort to the prom; the day he rejoiced at Franjo’s decision to pursue a medical career, although he entailed some yucky experiences, like opening the refrigerator and seeing the carcass of a cat to be dissected in her anatomy class. He didn’t live long enough to witness her graduation from medical school and her recitation of the Hippocratic oath, but the portrait he made of his daughter captures the triumph of a shy, young girl who was never afraid to dream and to pursue her dream to fruition. Her father’s daughter The third portrait in the retrospective exhibit is that of Bambi, short for Bambina, derived from Onib’s own nickname (Bambino). Bambi is all sugar-and-spice in appearance, but she is iron-and-steel when it comes to determination. A physical replica of her dad, she also inherited his artistic genes. Her portrait in acrylic on canvas compels the viewer with eyes that speak of her iron will and steely determination. Bambi’s character shines through the painting, evoking memories of instances when she showed her tenacity. Although Onib allowed her to take driving lessons, he prohibited her from driving the car when nobody else was around. Bambi, however, stuck to her guns, something which proved to be beneficial to the whole family whenever a driver was not available, considering that her mom’s and sister’s intelligence are not of the street-smart, spatial type. In all her other endeavors, however, Onib was fully supportive of his daughter. He would wait for his daughter during ballet sessions where he himself would be exposed to demonstrations that showed the intricacies of pliés and releves, pas de deux and arabesques. These unexpected demo-lectures on ballet gave Onib a basic backgrounder on the various ballet positions, which he would depict on canvas but, of course, with his trademark distortions—without the fey and dreamy quality of Degas’s impressionistic paintings. The artistic bent Bambi inherited from her father was recently illustrated in her first solo photo exhibit at Ayala Museum.

While her father expressed his world view by means of forms, colors and figures on canvas, Bambi has chosen to project her perspective through the silver lens. Her photographs illustrate her feel for composition and her technical skills in what is considered the art form of the digital era. Viewers were one in saying that her photographs were perceptive images of the real world, giving insights into the beauty all around us, escaping our notice because of our jaded outlook.