Text and photos by ELIZABETH LOLARGA
THE season of harvest has arrived for Brenda V. Fajardo.
In 2012 and in recent months, she has tucked one award after another under her belt: the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining from the Cultural Center, the Philippine Art Educators Association’s lifetime achievement award, Ateneo’s Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities and Philippine Women’s University’s Pamana Award.
There seems to be a cosmic pattern in the chronology in which she received each prize.
Fajardo, 73, visual artist, art mentor to generations and believer in anthroposophy, said these awards “follow the path of my life work backwards. [It’s] a review of my life. I’m being helped in this review to maybe prepare me for my afterlife. They’ve given me an affirmation that I have done right somehow.”
PWU complemented its award that recognized her pioneering spirit in the visual arts community with the exhibit “Verdadero” at the School of Fine Arts and Design (SFAD) Gallery. Noel Soler Cuizon, SFAD program coordinator for painting, gallery curator, art practitioner and incidentally Fajardo’s nephew and former apprentice, said the Spanish verdadero, which in English means “true” or “genuine,” suited his aunt’s spirit.
Fajardo said, “This must be his perception that I am true to what I do. I believe in the principle of ‘truth to materials.’ I guess the work is authentic when it’s true to one’s values, ideals, thoughts, feelings and will. Walang quieme o arte.”
So vast is her influence on Cuizon that he has adopted her view of life and attitude towards art. He said she has always applied “a multidisciplinary approach to art” that could explain why she has gone into many fields like art education, theater (as actor, set and costume designer), printmaking, painting, graphic illustration, book design.
He has seen how she remains “focused, diligent and passionate” in everything she does. He added, “When she was younger, she worked without a break, almost non-stop. She was a workaholic and taskmaster. The Brenda you see today, who likes playing with her dog, is more relaxed than before.”
Asked if she is still up to doing large works, Fajardo replied, “Yes, I think I can still manage, but since my heart surgery [in 2010], I have become lazy, a sluggard. This may be a form of depression, but I have been making small-scale works on paper to get me going. Perhaps I will soon wake up from this lethargy.”
Although technically retired, she maintains a routine of teaching two subjects once a week at the University of the Philippines, then going to the Philippine Educational Theater Association office where she is curriculum director.
Fajardo, who once dreamed of becoming a ballerina and joining Broadway plays, designed costumes for Dulaang UP’s “Ibong Adarna” and Tanghalang Pilipino’s “Stageshow.” She said the demand for this service signified that directors like Jose Estrella and Chris Millado “have faith in me. I’m not really a costume designer. I like to recycle, improvise and am a minimalist where that’s concerned. I believe in the aesthetics of poverty.”
In a colloquium on “Poetics and Politics of Performance in the Philippines Under Martial Law,” she defined these aesthetics that PETA pioneered in as implying “there is a sense of beauty which belongs to people who live in a condition of material deprivation. “
She said there are concepts of color, line, space, texture, rhythm, and movement that are conditioned by particular natural, cultural, and social environments. “It results from a particular quality of life that is conditioned by its reality.”
She further said the main point was not cutting down the expenses. Rather, “It was the new way of seeing the actualities of life—the various shades and combinations of colors that are seen daily in heaps of garbage and forms of attrition; the various tones of browns and grays seen in the skin of sunburned people, the broken down houses, and the shanties; the patches of color that peep out of once polychromed jeepneys—revealing a world heretofore unknown.”
She shared that colors and textures of found objects that reflected these realities were used for the sets; symbolic representations in the costumes, props, and the like were carefully chosen for its meaning.
The approach, she further said, not only expressed the truth, it also provided authentic aesthetic experience not only for its viewers but also for the creating artists. “It was possible to capture the patina of time and become more sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of local materials thereby increasing our powers of expression,” she said.
The social activist in Fajardo has not quite slowed down, but she has found delight in watching teleseryes, in lying down, trying to walk and exercise, eating less, especially carbohydrates, picking up her pencil and pen. In October, she will be at a visual arts workshop on “The Transformative Power of Art.”
