My Daddy Groovy, Hugo Yonzon, the cool painter

MANILA, Philippines - My dad, the painter Hugo Yonzon Jr., will have a major exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines on June 6, a few days after what would have been his 90th birthday. For several years after his death, my mom Betty would call her 13 surviving children and their families to gather on his birth anniversary. She would prepare her best dinner spread, prompting one of my nieces to ask: Bakit tayo nagpa-party, hindi ba patay na si lolo? Why not? My dad had always been the center of her life.

Sadly, 10 days before the June 6 exhibit, my mom, Vitaliana “Betty” Dagani Yonzon, herself passed away on May 28. She will be buried today, June 1, at Himlayang Pilipino.

The exhibit of my dad takes on another meaning then — a tradition started by my mom out of love and remembrance now being continued by all of us. 

Hugo Yonzon Jr. was a prolific painter but had only a few one-man shows in his lifetime. One of his friends, Neal Cruz, said that collectors came to pick up his works even before the paint dried, preventing him from gathering enough for a solo show. Plaudits and awards came early in his career but he dismissed himself as just one good artist, doing what he was obsessed with doing, painting the way he thought it should naturally be done, away from the bull of art movements.

Yonzon was born to a huge and well-off family. His father, Hugo Sr., was both a nurse and a lawyer and they lived in Singalong, in an enclave that gathered Kapampangans. His sisters recalled that their koyang, who was a natty dresser, danced a mean tango while the ditche played piano in the living room. I didn’t know that. My father didn’t talk much and even less about himself.

My memory of him is that he worked long hours. When he was art director for ad agencies during the daytime (Philprom, Adcraft, Philippine Advertising Counsellors, Hontiveros Associates), he painted and did commissioned works during the night. And when he worked with the papers (Evening News, Daily Express, Daily Globe) from dusk to night, he painted and accepted other works during the day. He even set up an easel in the Daily Express art room and continued to paint while he bantered and played domino with the younger artists.

My dad’s idea of a break was meditative pursuits — fishing, hunting and playing domino with his buddies. I tagged along on these trips and got really bored; I was just a kid after all. We set fishing rods at what was called “breakwater” in the Manila Bay long before there was CCP. And he and his buddies stalked tiklings and even wild pugo in the grasslands of San Luis town, at the foot of the fabled Mt. Arayat. I am sure the bucolic scenes of San Luis and that of Candaba inspired him no end. They would repeatedly come alive in his works: rural folks, the fishermen, their myths, and history.

My dad had no formal training in the arts. He spent only a semester at the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines then plunged readily into the professional field. Apart from his stints with advertising agencies, and newspapers, he illustrated for other publications. He was one of the pioneers in comics after World War II, and he was known for Sakay en Moy, a cartoon strip that first appeared in 1953 and ran for 19 years in the country’s then number one newspaper, The Manila Times.

My siblings and I have fond memories of Sakay en Moy, perhaps because we were alternately tasked by our mom to collect the weekly payments for it. All of us were trained to be independent. We rode the JD bus from Project 8 in Quezon City to Quiapo, then walked all the way to P. Florentino Street where the old Manila Times was. It was quite safe then for kids to do that. After getting the princely sum, we went to Chinatown to buy our favorite dikyam. That was the reward.

My dad was the general of the house, but my mom was the task sergeant. Whenever she gave any one of us her hour-long Visayan-accented sermons or plainly the belt, my dad would back off and mutter: “Hindi ako kasali dyan.” He was always cool.

My friend Maria Montelibano called my dad “Daddy Groovy.” He was fond of wearing loud clothes and drove a candy apple red Beetle or a metallic violet Mustang, yet remained ever reticent. He was as humble as he was proud, hardworking as he was laidback, mercurial as he was placid. My dad had the patience of a snorting bull yet had gentleness and serenity that bordered on nonchalance.

It was only in 1971, at age 47, that my dad had his first one-man show, at the La Solidaridad Gallery in Malate. His subjects remained the ordinary folks, very much representational but within environs that were cut into several planes and applied in thin oil paint. They were texturized with tiny, soft stubbles, applied patiently with small brushes. In that show, he demonstrated his passion for rendering stones and rocks, with character shaped by the pummeling of water, oxidation and the sun.

My dad’s friends said that Hugo was an artist looking for style, that when you saw his works you would think that you were looking at a group show. At home, my dad was a painter looking for a studio. He worked in the sala, the garage, and even in the bedroom we called “barracks” because most his children slept there.

In his final decade, Yonzon narrated the lives of fishermen, flower vendors, casco dwellers, and farmers in a style art writers called realism, only that his pieces still had traces of cubistic folds here and there. On his sixth and last one-man show at the Lopez Museum in 1989, all his oils became figurative, without the textures and distortions. He was probably home.

He died during one stormy week in October 1994. We had the wake at the village chapel and the residents must have wondered who was that quiet neighbor and why was the chapel filled from wall to wall with fragrant blossoms, from high government officials to banks and media establishments. The wet winds were very strong and sent the wreaths falling again and again and, each time, my eight sisters promptly put them back up; those were testaments to my dad and they had to remain standing. On the night before the burial, a lightning struck in half an old mango tree beside the chapel. The message was very clear: a mighty tree has fallen.

That would have been a dramatic narration but I bet my dad would have none of it. During the funeral procession, my mom made sure that no sad music would be played. So it was, we brought him to his rest with the lead car playing New York, New York.

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“A Glimpse of Hugo Yonzon Jr., Life and Works” will run from June 6 to July 6 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Bulwagang Juan Luna (Main Gallery).