Any Filipino artist interested in the formation of his/her identity specifically as Filipino cannot afford to bypass the life and work of Fernando Amorsolo. This Don Fernando (the other one being Zobel) is by now a genetic marker in what it is to be Pinoy. This is not to overstate that Amorsolo’s vision is patently quintessential. It merely accedes to the undeniable reconizability that Amorsolo renders traits that we are all to happy to call our own.

Amorsolo was and remains a rare retinal genius. Any practitioner of painting will glean from his works that deep visceral verity and affinity with what is observable, that shock of realization that this Master has magically wrought in pigment that which daily surrounds our eyes as light, athmosphere and ambience. As Amorsolo crafted mirrors of specific phenomena, he proposed a well-sifted set of reassuring if not alluring choices. His mature work included the gamut of light’s chromatic wonders, the magnetism of feminine sensuality and mystique, the gasp inducing vistas of peasants in a sun-drenched paradise of splendid and abundant countryside, the reassuring bathos of socially edyfing parables and fables steeped in warm light and dramatic chroma. But Amorsolo would be deafening in his silence about other observables: the frailty and repulsive imperfection of common men and women, the contradictions of poverty and their pains, the structural inequities that underpinned many of his idyllic and edifying tableaux. I believe that his personal aesthetic code led him to eschew tragedy, imbalance, pain, conflict, ironies of history and, in general, any form of realism that instigated discomfort. He was entitled to these choices, as all creative individuals are. That he made them is for students of art history and practice, now and in the deeper future, to justify or repudiate.

As a painter interested in Philippine art history, I have intersected with Don Fernando’s ethos on several occassions. As a student of painting in the 70s, the Amorsolo method was our formative template. I studied under Wenceslao Garcia and Bonifacio Cristobal, both direct students of the Don. His oeuvre was a template both learned yet resisted, as we struggled to carve our own idioms in these decades of nascent postmodernism. But it would not be denied, and I would have to admit that to love painting as a process is to understand the deep joy that Amorsolo himself undoubtedly cherised. He loved painting, in a way incomparable to other loves of his life. Any of us who practice expressive arts can identify with this deep affinity. We hold to differing contexts, and my homage/deconstructions of the Master will bear this out. As will the solitary joy of painting. Amorsolo could not have been better named. In poetic Filipino, his name might be recast as ‘Bukod-Tanging Pag-Ibig,’ descriptive of the irreplaceable satisfaction that painting, and now the multi-media facture of visuals, allows its devotees. We realize that all of us are grist for the qualifications of later generations, save for what we relish in those mystic moments when we are one and alone with this craft we love.

JOSE TENCE Ruiz
2009