The Pied Piper of Pundaquit

Walking towards the beach in San Antonio, Zambales, artist Elmer Borlongan and wife Plet Bolipata were greeted by a group of school age children. This was repeated a couple more times on the short stretch to the seaside. "Kuya Emong," which is how the children called after him, explained to me that they are his students in the community where he gives drawing lessons. This was part of the program for this season at Pundaquit, the annual festival organized by its artistic director, violinist Alfonso Bolipata, and held at Casa San Miguel. The multi-storey brick and slate casa has a reception area, an art gallery, accommodation for guests and a small concert hall. Alfonso Bolipata’s work-in-progress continues to add programs and extensions to this regional cultural center.

The Pundaquit season begins October and ends May the following year and features a busy calendar of weekend performances, artist’s talks, workshops and exhibitions. Most of these programs are designed to draw local people to Casa San Miguel. As a result Elmer Borlongan’s two-weekend drawing sessions that accompanied his exhibition became known not just to the children but also to their parents.

Borlongan is no stranger to giving workshops to children. A product of a grant from the Children’s Museum and Library, Inc. (CMLI), he benefited from art tutorials he received from mentor Fernando Sena. Like Sena, Borlongan teaches art to others, hoping that they too will have the access and advantages he had. Borlongan’s paintings shape further his ideas of where his art belongs. Borlongan’s exhibition at the Casa San Miguel shows a mini-retrospective, exhibiting 10 years of his drawings. It was an offshoot of his exhibition at The Drawing Room in Makati held in April last year.

In this instance, he displays 21 drawings, some of which have become studies of his major works in oil, like "Tampuhan" (1992), "Walang Iwanan" (1998), and "Entablado" (1999). To Borlongan, however, drawings can work both ways. Besides serving as studies, they can be finished products, too. These finished drawings show images where he would alter compositions or change the positions of figures. Others show details of hands and angles of heads.

Borlongan claims that drawings tend to express his ideas and emotions directly without the intervention of other materials besides pencil and paper. In the gallery, he also displays his sketch pads. They show his ideas that have evolved and which he later summarized as "narrative figurations." These are akin to documentation or ethnography of everyday life of his neighbor in Mandaluyong. Soon he would extend these to other neighborhoods and places he visits. His keen observations of people in their daily lives involve unfolding pictures where many things go on at the same time.

In "Tampuhan," he provides a sharp contrast to Juan Luna’s painting of the same title made more than a century ago. Luna showed a lone couple waiting out the impasse by looking away from each other as they sit next to an open window. Borlongan’s version places the couple near the center of a big hall. They sit intimately on a sofa with the woman’s head resting on the man’s chest. Oblivious to the numerous people around them, they seem to be caressing each other and about to resolve their conflict. The hall is divided by the architectural details, as the people in it are divided by the space. It is uncertain if indeed they are part of a big party or a secret club, and Borlongan leaves us to decipher the story.

He says it takes him a month to fill a 60-page sketch pad. This fascinated me just as his practice of drawing on any surface he can get his hands on. It is a habit that has persisted since he was young and could not even afford to buy a sketch pad. Borlongan has always believed that "improvisation is the culture of necessity." Drawing is that necessity which is the act of the moment, being able to convey his expression or emotion. In this sense, this is the main reason why he has also kept his figures without hair. Like drawing, his figures which are devoid of hair provide a direct view and a general perspective that life is about essences. Borlongan’s commitment to his art is betrayed in the essence of his drawings.

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