Collecting Pinoy art

Good friend and fellow foodie Margaux Salcedo asked me along to a gourmet dinner a few weeks ago, saying it would be at a private residence, and that the host would also want to show us the latest pieces acquired for a burgeoning art collection.

To my surprise, it was at the home of Makati Rep. Abby Binay Campos and her husband and partner in collecting contemporary Philippine art, Luis Campos. Their five-year-old daughter Martina joined us for the elegant Japanese-style meal washed down initially with good Chilean red wine, then Glenlivet single malt whisky.

Rep. Abby stuck to Coke, which Martina kept sharing rather surreptitiously until I alerted her mom about it, heh-heh. It wasn’t till after the repast that Luis joined us, with his San Mig beer, by which time Margaux and I were deep into the Glenlivet. Obviously, the woman-about-town cum food writer had alerted our host on my libation preferences — unless of course she had planned for her own post-prandial digestif.

All around us in the capacious den-like room where the dinner had been set up on a hardwood table were what must have been close to a hundred paintings, most still stacked up in corners while a score were arrayed rather temporarily on the available parts of walls, like above a cabinet and the long sliding glass doors for entry from the patio.

It certainly wasn’t a gallery setting, more of an ad hoc repository or way station. After all, the Camposes were only renting a friend’s house in Dasma. 

Oh, there was arresting, priceless sculpture, too. Prominent on the table were three works of our genius-friend Ramon Orlina: one the usual green and geometrically abstract chunk, another of dark blue, and the third an unusual yellow. Three more elegant Orlinas stood side by side atop the wooden cabinet, one the characteristic sensuous green, plus two more of his yellow series.

For the half-dozen Orlinas alone, my occasionally criminal mind of wanton imagination just had to play a quick little exercise: how easy would it be to break into this den, from the village street and maybe over the wall into the patio?

Any scenarios starting to unfold graphically in my darting eye’s mind went poof when I learned that our host Hon. Abby was a graduate of the Ateneo law school and had formed her own law firm well before she had run for Congress, where she made a name for herself by authoring certain salient pieces of legislation, and perhaps more importantly — at least in the rational public’s mind — for her staunch advocacy of the RH Bill.

It wasn’t until nearly a decade ago that she and Luis started acquiring Pinoy art, first for the bedrooms, then a few for the house corridors, and some for Abby’s office in Congress. Luis is so enamored of art, Pinoy art in particular, that when he opened a resto-bar in A. Venue on Makati Avenue with some friends, he insisted that it also serve as an art gallery, and that it be named Botong’s, after Carlos “Botong” Francisco.

In any case, also drawing my now chastised and less shifty eyes throughout the dinner and the dessert that followed were several other recognizable pieces. Close to the Orlinas, set on an easel by the cabinet’s end was a Betsy Westendorp. I asked and was proven right. Beyond that, on the walls forming a corner were a couple of Onib Olmedos — of his dark, ghoulish girls series, or at least that’s what I used to call it. Beside those were a couple of cubistic Ang Kiu Koks, the lower one of what looked like a horse from where I sat, unless it was one of his howling-dog series.

After our meal, I excused myself and padded out to the patio to smoke my Fortune with the filter snipped off. And looked up at the glorious full moon ascending appropriately past a dozen lit capiz orbs hanging from the branches of an old calacuchi.

Before I retook my place on the table, I cursorily inspected another corner, the one behind my seat, and serendipitously espied, hanging on the wall over another stack of large paintings, a couple of early BenCabs. One was of a shack on what appears to be a shoreline. Recalling my bio subject’s youth, and mine, I surmised that it must have been painted while he was still a young man working as a graphics guy at the US embassy, when on weekends he would join Ermita painters in their sorties around Luneta and the rest of what was then still called Dewey Blvd.

On an easel before the two BenCab treasures was a recent painting by the gifted Andres Barrioquinto: an androgynous, earnest face that took up most of the large canvas, the headgear sporting geometrical shapes that turned out to be rows of butterflies. Dainty pink and white flowers that barely concealed seven birds of the same long-billed species framed the subject’s cheeks.

Atop a smaller cabinet on the far wall stood a resplendent Hernando Ocampo of his distinctive red swatches, while leaning on the center of the sliding glass doors was obviously the latest acquisition, a large nude swathed in clear plastic that looked so realistic that at first sight I thought the new arrival still had to be unsheathed. I wasn’t familiar with the artist. Both Luis and Abby avidly endorsed him: Julmard Vicente.

On the strip of wall above those glass doors hung seven or eight paintings, none more recognizable than one that had me drooling in envy: a Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, of flowers.

Buoyed by the single malt, I unabashedly confessed to Abby, Luis and Margaux that that was the one piece in their collection that had me super-inggit.

Then I recounted how my most precious memory of my beloved Tita Cory was when she rang up, landline, one Sunday in the late ’90s to thank me for something I had written, and we wound up chatting about painting. When she asked how I was doing, I had mentioned that I was finding more time to devote my Sundays to doing landscapes, but that I was nowhere close to her level of skill. That got her off, and soon I was receiving instructions on how to do flowers, and she kept stressing that I should use acrylic, not oil.

Well, BenCab had said that to me, too, so at least now I have a Sunday painter’s bragging rights to claim having been blessed with advice on art-making by no less than two very important Filipino artists. 

Sitting there in that art den also made me recall with a pang in my heart and mind’s eye all those evenings I enjoyed at old friend Carlos “Chuckie” Arellano’s residence cum extensive art gallery at Blue Ridge B. Chuckie left us a couple of months ago. Now I wonder what will happen to his vast collection of Pinoy art.

I admire and envy art collectors. I’ve been meaning to find time to visit the Pinto Gallery in Antipolo that’s been a labor of love continuously enhanced by collector Dr. Joven Cuanang. My friend Rene Guatlo says he can arrange for a day’s visit, better yet to cap that with a weekend retreat at Dr. Joven’s other baby of a haven, his resort villa in Currimao.

Oh, to find time, time — to appreciate more art, perchance do a bit ourselves, never mind if no collector ever picks up our own work/s. 

In any case, I was grateful for that evening with Rep. Abby and Luis and Martina. As we were wheeling out of Dasma, Margaux says that she hopes our common friend Erap wins in Manila, as she’s heard of how he’s promised to turn the “city of our affections” into an art and culture bastion. He did? I ask Margaux. When she repeats it, I say I regret being Pasigueño, otherwise if I were still a resident in the “loyal and ever noble” then I’d check Erap on the ballot. Then when he’s installed as Mayor, I’d seek him out to congratulate him personally, and to personally request that he consider an old proposal that Billy Lacaba and I had, still have — that a larger-than-life statue of Nick Joaquin be erected on a part of the Remedios Circle plaza. Have Julie Lluch do it: Nick not erect but sitting before his typewriter, with a San Mig bottle on one corner of his working table.

Okay, Sir Erap, do it, and do it. Give us our Joaquin (whose birthday it was last Saturday, by the by).

And if I seem to be going UNA with our featured Binay and feature-ending Erap, let me assure everyone, especially Tita Cory’s son and brethren and most of my friends that I’m voting for Grace, Sonny, Risa, Bam and Jun. The first three aren’t really close friends of mine, but I’ve known them enough to admire their persons and capabilities. Bam, I have yet to meet, but he strikes me as an idealistic and hard-working young man, and he’s definitely a good Aquino. Jun, I once rode in a lift with, and we exchanged more than civil words. And I remain impressed not only with his good genes but his past legislative work and modest manner.

So from art to politics, we stay high-spirited. For Tita Cory’s sake. For Nick’s. And for the sake of all our models in the aesthetics of hope and exhilaration.