Sons of art

MANILA, Philippines - An artist is neither born nor made, they are both. In the strangest cliché, this sense is true as the younger son of Art Sena relates their childhood. Mang Paul Belen Sena is the fourth son among six boys and a girl.

“We were poor,” he says. He was the son of a young scholar named Arturo Sena by his wife Faustina Belen, a local laundry lady within the badlands of Tondo.

Life was tough. As a young boy, Paul and his brothers did their share to somehow put something on the dinner table. They would wake up at 2 a.m. to sell newspapers and comics. Mang Paul took long walks to Ongpin to meet his patrons, a number of whom were prostitutes. While waiting for his customers, Mang Paul would copy the illustrations from his merchandise on scratch paper to ease his boredom.

The young Senas are gifted artists especially the eldest, Antonio, who could memorize details at a glance. His other siblings would ask him to draw illustrations for school projects, but oftentimes their pleas were rejected because Tony had chores lined up. Fernando, the third born, is now an academic consultant at the University of the Philippines Fine Arts, and the most popular among the sons of art. The fourth son is Mang Paul, who I referred to as a true-blooded Artistang Bayan.

Mang Paul is a contemporary of the elder Fernando, who shares great interest in “cubism,” a form of semi-abstraction that is an important movement in the Modern French Painting. Popularized by Picasso and Bracque in 1907, the art form is comparatively geometric, and spoken of as an analytical or synthetic and two- or three-dimensional.

Through cubism, Mang Paul describes his style as figurative. It is a movement of fast lines enclosed within curves to form bright colored three-dimensional figures, which represent the people and society. In a holistic point of view, these figures coincide with zymology embedded within the frame, and Mang Paul admits that he is unaware of such incorporation to his artworks.

As I watch him put finishing touches on his latest obra “The Harvest,” a vigilant eye opened up before me. These new figures introduced a new meaning to what was originally a narrative of prosperity, love, and close family ties, that life’s balance and sense of contentment is achieved once these ideals were perceived. Without seeing those little things, life’s cause is lost and the people as well as the society are bent to aspire for superficial things.

Truly, this lowly painter from Tondo knows how to live his life. At 60, Mang Paul held a number of successful shows and has received numerous awards. He is regularly invited by Jollibee to conduct summer art classes. He’s a mentor to some up-and-coming Pinoy visual artists, but beyond the adjectives, Mang Paul is a good father to his adopted children.

An Artistang Bayan in the truest sense of the word, he has been documenting the Filipino way of life through his paintings for nearly five decades. Through those years, he lives by the ideals depicted by the paintings he created. A worker building a nation, a mother tending her child, a scholar studying amid the urban chaos, the joy of a healthy catch, a hunch to a one-percent luck. These are just some of Mang Paul’s favorite subjects in his canvas and diligently lived from day-to-day. At days end, he shares his sense of humor with the youngsters while reaping the fruits of his harvest.