Lamarroza’s Landscapes: Beyond the pastoral

In his most recent works, Prudencio Lamarroza returns to familiar grounds beloved of the old romantics. They still abound, who rhapsodized on what Arnold Hauser referred to as "an autonomous world, the picture of an unreal, ideal existence," and who thus "painted the poetry of the sacred grove," and beloved as well of the naturalists, who chose to paint "the prose of rural life – the clearing with the grazing cattle, the river with the ferry, the field with the hayrick."

It is obvious, looking at Lamarroza’s new landscapes, that he belongs to the latter category, and while tiny wisps and strips of whimsical color manage to find their place in the serene topography of his fields and mountains, the general atmosphere evoked is certainly not of the sunny pastoral, but one of closely observed quotidian existence in the countryside or hinterland, detached without being remote, with just the subtlest of foreboding and even a note of disquiet. There is not the cheery airiness or radiance of classic impressionism, but rather a more subdued, somber-hued view of the rural scene, its rotes and its seasons. In "Golden Harvest," for instance, the peasants are blackened, tiny figures sketched out on a yellow field, where the backbreaking work of harvesting and gleaning is impervious to the balm of ambient rondalla music (as in the home-grown romantic vision).

The artist, celebrated in recent years for the polychromatic vibrancy of his ethno-environmentalist works, exemplified by the Amburayan river series has, seemingly without warning, eschewed his exuberant expressionism to retrace a much-trod, albeit hallowed, track of representation which he himself had followed in an earlier era.

Lamarroza grew up on a farm in Tagudin, Ilocos Sur. From the land, his family of peasant stock drew all of life’s sustenance, and like many a young Filipino whose roots are in the province, he had gone through the rites of passage and the rigors of labor in the countryside. As soon as he discovered he could reproduce his world on paper and canvas, he started limning the landscapes of his childhood, vanishing scenes which of course never really went away but simply recycled themselves through the seasons, monsoon after monsoon, generation after generation. These he recreated in small-scale paintings all throughout the ’60s, with the recurring subject being the universal image of Philippine rural life, man and carabao, a theme reprised in some of the works in his latest exhibit.

The scenes depicted in these current works were first captured as photographs in various places visited by this itinerant artist and lensman, who is equally at home roaming the streets of Manila and trekking the hinterlands and seashores of the country for epiphanies bright or dark. Thus he travelled to Aparri, crossing over to Pagudpud in Ilocos Norte, down to Ilocos Sur to revisit the Amburayan region, which gave rise to the spectacular period of his ethnic diwata and pointillistic river stones with which his name and fame are permanently associated. He journeyed as well to Batangas, Laguna, and on down to the Bicol region, lugging his trusty set of professional cameras that have been as much a sorcerer’s device as his paintbrush.

While the earlier landscapes ranged from surreal and semi-representational to, as Emmanuel Torres put it, "abstraction inspired by plane geometry or pattern art," his latest works leap from the "neo-romantic" to a rediscovered naturalism inspired, among other things, by the artist’s new private surroundings: an elevated habitat of trees, grass and rocks high above the Binangonan ridge, with a majestic vista of the lake shore region; and an uncluttered view of the whole sky proffering an infinite variety of cloud formations at daytime and a smog-free firmament of stars at night.

A psychologist who has worked with therapy-through-art, viewing the two contrasting styles of Lamarroza for the first time and comparing them, was moved to comment that the artist, in the earlier series, projected a longing for some faraway point in space, literally and figuratively, given the indeterminacy of the misty background, in fact the layers of background, represented by the ghosts of mountains. The analyst goes on: "Because only the artist holds the secret to what actually lurks beyond, the viewer must imagine in their mind what lies there, according to their needs, motives, conflicts, but in the newer works, the artist seems to have come to terms with his external reality, with the world of his beginnings. And yet, while Amburayan was purposely vague and mystical, in his new representational works the artist has not relinquished the elements of expansiveness and mystery, he does not reveal all, and there is always something beneath the surface, or over the horizon."

Finding the repose with which to create his landscapes, seascapes, cloudscapes, genre scenes and the occasional fanciful piece, like "Floating Naiad," has meant, for the artist, moving from a high-rise condominium in Manila to this nearly solitary sanctuary in the highlands of Rizal. Here, he has raised free-range chickens, darting and clucking about and begetting chicks, planted trees which he waters everyday, and set up installations in the form of boles and boughs felled by the winds, bundled up as altars of wood, on top of which he places food for the birds, resident or migratory.

The shift – in style, aesthetic, theme and point in view – is most dramatically evident in "Seaward from Amburayan," in which the artist has taken the high ground to reveal the natural layout of his hometown – a country of hills and woodlands crisscrossed by trails, footpaths, tributaries and the main body of the Amburayan river, here depicted not as dead or dying but evincing a flicker of life, still managing to meander its way towards the China Sea in the distance. At the top of the painting is a swirling mass of clouds, absent or merely suggested in the semi-abstract "Amburayan Queen" series. At the bottom of the painting is a pair of trees, or two boles from a mother trunk, one diseased and devoid of greenery, the other darkly robust and sprouting leaves, the duality being emblematic of the uncertain ecological future of the artist’s hometown.

In "The Fertile Land," the scene is dominated by ayoung bull, placed off-center on the canvas, whose dark hump becomes a reference point for its replications elsewhere – the contour of the hills, the crown of the trees, the central peak of the mountain range, and even the banks of clouds. Cattle, and not the more ubiquitous carabaos, are the draught animals in the highlands of Laguna and Batangas, which is the setting. There is just the faintest unfamiliarity of such an agrarian landscape, usually a paean to the water buffalo. Fertility is suggested in various ways. The distant peak could be an extinct volcano, of which we have many, whose ancient ejecta made this land loam-rich in ages past. The land is abundant in vegetation and crops, a plot of brown earth awaits the next round of furrowing and planting. The potency of the earth has its counterpoint in the young bull’s dark genitals forming a symmetry with his beastly hump. Two peasants, perhaps man and wife, are centrally located in point of space, but as in the other farm scenes of the artist, are diminutive, almost indiscernible. We have no idea if they are freeholders of the land they till or are mere tenants to those who own such a vast swathe of the earth’s resources. Here it is the bull who is master of everything he surveys.

"Ruminants in Eden" is the nearest that the artist gets to an Arcadian-kabukiran depiction of the agricultural world without getting rapturous. With humans conspicuously absent, grazing cows – reasonably contented from their heft – have the land all to themselves. Where they feed is unusual pasture land, where green vegetation is strewn all over with pink patches more identified with flower beds. There is only the slightest spot of brown at the right center edge to suggest that this is fallow land. The summer sun lights up the untilled foothills. The orange spottings on vegetation suggests the season of firetrees. The cloud formations are of two kinds – white billows peeping from behind the mountains’ spine and pink scuds in the vast blue sky. The odd one out is the decapitated palm tree at the edge of the field, perhaps victim to wind or the weevil.

But while Lamarroza has long proven himself as a master of detail and verisimilitude, this is not his main preoccupation here, rather "the individuality of each phenomenon," as William Vaughn has paraphrased Constable, the great landscape artist of the early 19th century, theorist of the "natural painture," who once wrote that "no two days are alike, not even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves alike since the creation of the world." Thus, similarly, one can construe as Lamarroza’s aim "to observe individuality in movement, light and atmosphere," in Vaughn’s words, and "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the chiaroscuro in nature… to render permanent many of those splendid but evanescent Exhibitions, which are ever occurring in the endless variety of Nature, in her eternal changes," in Constable’s.

Lamarroza’s latest works form a striking contribution to the wealth of landscape art in Philippine painting. His rendering of reality, first gleaned by his photographic/topographic eye, his restraint concealing a deep reverence, and the unmistakable nostalgia for the certitudes and simplicities of life on the farm without idealizing them, give credence to the linkages between art, nature and life implicit in Simon Schama’s observation: "For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock."

Back in his meditative surroundings, the artist has to retreat into the wall-bound space where he works with now small, now giant canvases, then seek relaxation in a softly lighted room crammed with high-tech sound and visual gadgetry, where music and digital animation create another world for him. Yet before one can judge that this kind of personal space is utterly desensitized, an etherized world removed from reality, one remembers the free-range chickens outside, the growing balete and fruit trees, the open-air installations, and the grandeur of the lakeshore landscape, which together give the artist the truest recreation of his spirit. He has indeed found a place in the cosmos where Earth, Ethos and Ego intersect, that is to say, Lamarroza remains rooted to this world, and to his remembered land.

The artists of landscapes, forever in search of a personal eden where they can reproduce nature in accordance with their aesthetics, need only remember the words of Henry David Thoreau, whose lines in his 1856 Journal are used by Schama, with which to begin and end his monumental Landscape & Memory: "It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream."

This could just be another way of saying that what actually matters most to Lamarroza and to any painter of nature is the unfolding event, the changing moment, in the vast, shifting, never fully knowable landscape of the mind.