Text and photos by ELIZABETH LOLARGA
THE open area used to be a parking lot in Mandaluyong City, a concrete space between a wet and dry market and an almost run-down theater until the last was turned into a business process outsourcing center.
The place has been gentrified and reinvented into what is now Greenfield District Central Park . The past weekend it hosted “Art For Generations,” a two-day feast of visual arts, crafts, music and workshops. It was not unlike the Friends of the National Museum of the Philippines’ yearly, open-air fund-raiser “Art in the Park” in Salcedo Village, Makati City.
A string and vocal trio sang Christmas carols in English, Filipino and Spanish, an acoustic guitarist accompanied himself and did a good cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” On the last evening the Soulful Mood Strings under Bernard Calma obliged with requests for samba hits after doing pop tunes and carols.
Portraitists and watercolorists from the watercolor group Agos Kulay did visitors’ portraits for P200 a pop, all proceeds going to the post-super typhoon Yolanda relief and rehabilitation efforts.
Longtime galleries like Liongoren, Gallery Big (outlet of painter Jun Balasbas who does portraits of showbiz icons in mixed media or acylic on canvas), Galeria de las Islas, Now Gallery+Auctions were represented, standing comfortably apart but together with newbies in the visual arts scene: Light & Space Contemporary that has an ongoing inaugural group show at Fort Victoria bldg., The Fort, Taguig City, Cevio Art Haus in Kapitolyo, Pasig City, and Prometheus Atelier.
The last can be reached through www.facebook.com/prometheusatelier. It served as an art one-stop shop during the fair, accepting portrait commissions at P500 each with a ready-made frame to protect the work of Simkin de Pio. The atelier, managed by his wife Roselle, also offers cleaning and conservation services.
It carries, among others, the rare prints by de Pio’s father Gig, the works of Pancho Villanueva (architect, filmmaker and poet), hyper-realist painter Julius Samson and Frances Abrigo who does paper cuts and stencils that stand on the borderline between painting and printmaking.
A stand-out booth was Craft MNL’s. It carried consigned items from different crafts people and artisans like Alunsina Handbound Books. The blank notebooks came covered in hand-tooled, leather-bound covers. Storyteller Jan Vincent Sarabia Ong, who produces free digital Filipino books for children under his own aegis Halo Halo, is part of Craft MNL’s team. Similarly collaborating with the team is Hocus Manila Bicycles and Screen Prints.
Young couple Andrei Salud and Sheina Tobias focus on silkscreen printing on posters, art print, postcards, all in small editions of from 20 to 50 copies. She said, “We sometimes go up to a hundred, but we don’t go beyond that.”
Hip couples turn to them for wedding invitations. Salud said, “They appreciate that we do things by hand. They’re not something digitally printed or mass produced. Normally these invitations go through offset printing. But silkscreen gives an invite a texture that you can feel. It has imperfections that give a look that’s different.”
They used to silkscreen t-shirts but stopped when they saw many other doing the same and flooding the market. They instead chose to push screen printing into an art form and to show its other applications apart from works on paper. They’re silk-screening images on wood.
Although graduated from the Mapua in Makati, where he majored in visual communication management, Salud still took up what he called “casual classes” in printmaking with Bernard Temperosa of Far Eastern University and Philippine Women’s University. He also did a semester’s worth of work at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco under its continuing special program for graduates.
But it was from Danny Suerte, who lives in a shack on an alley in Novaliches, Quezon City, that he and Tobias owe their mastery of silkscreen techniques.
In awe of the guy whose water supply would sometimes be cut off from unpaid bills, Salud said, “He’s quite resourceful and ingenious. The thing with going to fine arts school is this–you have lots of equipment; you become dependent on the space or the processes. So there’s no efficiency, there’s a lot of wastage. With Mang Danny we learned about conserving resources. He had only one-tenth the size of a studio space, but he could do a lot and teach us a lot.”
Suerte and Temperosa helped Hocus Manila design, layout and build its shop. The raw materials for silk screening include house paint, store-bought screens that are modified to make them sturdier and other supplies available in Divisoria.
To keep their art advocacy going, Salud and Tobias do graphic design, build or restore bikes. She said, “Depending on what the owner likes in terms of colors and look, we personalize their bikes. You want modern or classic? We can do it.”