Betsy Westendorp and the light fantastic

An afternoon with 81-year-old Spanish artist Betsy Westendorp de Brias is almost fantastical, filled with stories in between cakes and cheese about meeting Fernando Amorsolo, Salvador Dali and Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as doing portraits of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Princess Margaret of England, Spain’s Franco family and assorted Spanish royalty. It helps also that Westendorp’s home studio in a building overlooking Manila Bay with its now-occasional orange sunsets is suffused with light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Monolithic paintings of flowers render the walls invisible. As if the whole room were composed of leaves, light and luscious colors. You could almost smell the violets. The fresco-like paintings make you think for a moment you were in some faraway palace of some long-ago king. Betsy Westendorp talks and time stands still.

“There is a very nice relationship between the painter and the sitter,” Betsy says. “Making portraits from photographs is a shortcut, but something very important is lost in the process. You can copy the likeness from a photograph because the features are there, as well as the proportions and everything.”

But when you’re sitting face-to-face with the subject, she stresses, it’s as if you’re reading the person’s mind, or getting into the seams of his or her soul. The interaction is interesting and rewarding and quite ineffable.

Betsy pauses, eyes twinkling. “(When anybody asks me what my favorite portrait is, so far) I always say it’s the last. I usually fall in love with my sitters. When I tell my daughters Isabel, Sylvia and Carmen about the good things I have discovered about a particular sitter, they tell me, ‘Ah, there you are again. You dream that everybody who sits for you is marvelous!’ (laughs).”

Westendorp remembers herself as a young girl who was always drawing and drawing. The name “Betsy” comes from her godmother who was a very famous Dutch painter named Betsy Osieck Westendorp. She wanted to take up fine arts but then her strict grandmother was adamantly against it. The old lady bellowed, “Over my dead body you will go that place because they have nude men sitting for portraits.” Betsy had private teachers and she was forever doing portraits of her relatives. She recalls, “My sisters were the poor sitters who suffered most (laughs).”

The skill for portraiture, she says, is inborn. Like being born with a good ear for music. Either you have it or you don’t. 

Betsy first arrived in Manila in 1951 shortly after marrying Filipino-Spanish businessman Antonio Brias. She remembers how she and her husband, after a working day at San Miguel, would take long walks and equally long drives through the old Roxas Boulevard to watch the setting sun. “For my husband, the sunset was very important, very beautiful, so I learned to love the sunset because of him.” Her husband passed away in 1976.

Later on when the family settled into the bayside residence that Westendorp maintains to this very day, Betsy followed a regular routine. 

“By 5:30 p.m. I would be looking out the window with my camera or taking note of all the colors that I saw.” Alizarin crimson. Burnt sienna. Ultramarine blue.

She is saddened with all the changes in the city. Decades ago when she opened her window, all she saw was the sea, all the long miles of it. People used to walk by the beloved boulevard by the ocean. Nowadays the colors are not the same, with a palette of rainbows giving way to despairing gray. Pollution has cast a dark shade across the canvas of the sky. But sometimes beauty still manages to squeak through. How difficult it is to paint something beautiful when all around her is grimness and grayness?

“I don’t paint what I see in that case. I paint what I remember,” Betsy muses. 

She has indelible memories of flowers that garden her homes in Manila and Madrid. The artist considers them “miracles” that we take for granted. “The beauty of the flower is unbelievable, incredible.”

The peony is her favorite, also the orchid. She explains, “Peonies are very soft, but there is no variety. When it comes to orchids, the variety never ends.”  

Betsy recalls working on a series titled “Madrid by Night,” featuring paintings of terrazas glowing with electric light, violet hippodromes, avenues and alleyways. “That was very enjoyable to do. I got a table and painted on the spot, starting at 11 at night and ending up at 2 in the morning.” One time, two strangers approached her and asked if she was selling her paintings. When they left, Betsy’s plastic bag filled with tissue and empty paint tubes was gone. “Imagine their surprise as they reached inside the bag expecting money only to find toilet paper with paint (laughs).” 

Westendorp talks about Spanish masters Goya and Velasquez with reverence. “Each day I become more and more fascinated with Goya — the colors, his imagination, the spontaneity of his brushes. Incredible.” And even if she talks about Velasquez being kept away from painting because of his chores as the mayordomo of the king, she says his art is astounding.

She talks about another Spanish master: Salvador Dali.

“I met Dali in Madrid in 1972 at the opening of an exhibition of his jewelry. He was very extravagant, of course (laughs).”

A lady introduced Betsy to Dali: “This is Betsy, a painter. She recently had a successful exhibit herself. I’m sure she would want to paint a portrait of you.”

Dali took one look at Betsy, snorted and exclaimed, “How much are you going to pay me for sitting for you?” You could just imagine Dali’s mustache surreally sticking out like a limp, beached and nameless thing.

Meeting the eccentric surrealist was cool, but Betsy looked back more fondly on her encounters with the Filipino master: Fernando Amorsolo.

“The kindness of heart that Amorsolo had is not easy to find,” says Betsy, who used to visit him in 1954 in his studio on Azcarraga Street then on Cordillera Street.

“I was fortunate enough to be one of his subjects. He was very humble. Did you know how much money he had in the bank when he died? Fifty pesos. That is very sad, when you see all the recognition he’s getting now.”

She says Amorsolo generously gave her tips on what colors to use and mix when painting sunsets — everything she scrawled on yellow lined paper. Sounds as esoterically valuable as the Vinci Code. (A digression: Betsy is another kind soul herself. When I asked copies of the Amorsolo notes, she copied the entire folder into a CD. Not a lot of artists would do that.)

Poetic Portraits

The mind wonders how an elegant octogenarian can put swathes upon swathes of oil paint on canvases averaging around 14 by 12 feet. She points to a metal contraption that holds aloft one of her paintings. “That thing was built for me when I was painting for Mrs. Marcos who ordered huge paintings for Leyte.”

Betsy recalls painting inside Malacañang’s Maharlika Hall, which used to be the office of President Quezon. “One day, Mrs. Marcos’ secretary told me, ‘I’m not sure whether Madame said 11 feet or11 meters.’ So I said, ‘You better make sure because it’s not the same…’ (laughs).” Betsy’s metal contraption allows her to move each canvas or painting-in-progress up and down through a series of pulleys and levers, very ingenious. Consider it an artistic assembly line. “I had one built in Madrid also consisting of plastic pipes and pulleys.”

Westendorp’s art career began in 1971. She says two people were instrumental in getting her started: then-ambassador to Spain Luis Gonzalez and wife Vicky Quirino-Gonzalez. The ambassador invited Betsy to mount her first show in Madrid, while Vicky looked for high-profile sitters to pose for portraits. “One day, Vicky called me. ‘Get this telephone number,’ she excitedly said. ‘That’s the Palace de Zarzuela.’ And that was where the future king, Prince Juan Carlos, was living. The ambassador’s car came to pick me up and brought me to the palace. I couldn’t have had a better start.” 

She never looked back. From then on, Westendorp became famous for her portraits of royalty and celebrities — from Carmen Polo de Franco to Christina Ford. King Juan Carlos cites Betsy as his favorite painter, and lauds how she was able to portray him the way he sees himself.

“In painting portraits, I start with the forehead,” she explains. “Then go down little by little. I use paint paint; I don’t use charcoal. I work on it like a puzzle — the eyes, then the nose… The mouth is the trickiest part. Interesting what John Singer Sargent said once: ‘A portrait is a painting where there is always something wrong with the mouth…’ (laughs).”

Betsy’s Reflections

After five years in Spain, Westendorp — a recent recipient of the Philippine Presidential Medal of Merit for Art and Culture for her promotion of the country through her artistic work — has come home to Manila to mount an exhibit of landscapes, flowers and portraits titled “Reflections,” which opens on March 12, 6:30 p.m., at the Mandarin Oriental Suites, fourth floor of Gateway Mall, Araneta Center. Acting as curator and consultant for the exhibition is Betsy’s longtime friend Silvana Diaz.

“Betsy is able to capture the mood of the moment,” Diaz explains. “You could almost feel that you’re part of nature. The paintings have that misty, nostalgic look. Her strokes are elegant. She makes you feel the beauty of flowers — their softness, gentleness. What they only lack is the smell. When I see Betsy’s huge paintings, I feel as if I am in the presence of old frescoes.” 

 “Reflections” features 30 new paintings, aside from a number of earlier ones such as her Tagaytay and tropical orchids series. Betsy points to the ones inside her home studio, particularly of a painting of a pond in her home in Spain, with an oriental statue beside it. Curiously, there are blue water hyacinths in bloom near the water. “I based them on the flowers in the Pasig River (laughs).”

Beautiful blue migrant flowers. Maybe metaphors of how the artist brings along memories of Manila whenever she is in Madrid.

With a series of exhibitions slated for the venerable artist (“Reflections” at Gateway, a mother-and-daughter show with Carmen at Ayala Museum, and a solo show at Manila Contemporary Gallery), it’s hard for Betsy to imagine not painting and simply being a woman of leisure.

“I could not consider myself doing anything else,” she shares. “The reward in itself is being able to painting. We painters are very lucky. We do what we love.”

A ballerina gets very sad when the years come one after the other, and she discovers the dancer and the dance are not one anymore. The flesh defeats the spirit. Gravity rules unsparingly. But painters can do what they love even in their twilight years — push the brush across the canvas and approximate or maybe even elevate the beauty of nature. “As long as the hand is steady and the eyes are still able to see,” concludes Betsy.

Art, in the hands of someone like Betsy Westendorp, endures.

Life can be short, but light is forever.

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The opening reception of Betsy Westendorp’s “Reflections” is on March 12, 6:30 p.m., at the Mandarin Oriental Suites, fourth floor of Gateway Mall, Araneta Center. The show is on view until March 23.