Caught on Canvas

This is Mt. Makiling viewed and seen from a lake shoreline in Calamba, one chilly and sparkling December morning - or at least this is what I can depict from the nostalgia of having lived, grew and beheld this beautiful mountain, deep in the heart of Laguna, my hometown, from which I grew amidst the bright sunshine and fresh greenery. And even if my family lived in a small suburban area in the sleepy town of San Pedro, the profile of Mt. Makiling, likened to a sleeping woman, could still be seen piercing clouds in any given dewy, sparkling morning. I grew to love that sleepy green mountain -- not only me, but all my other townsfolk who came to call Laguna home. To us, she (Makiling is a "woman" to us, a very, "modest lady mountain") is more than just a gigantic pile of rock and volcanic material as passive geology books describe. She is the massive, living heart of our hometown. With her head in a veil of clouds, verdant impenetrable forests and primordial trees swaying in the wind, you would be overwhelmed with the majesty and think of the peaks as God's footstool on Earth. That nostalgia inspired me to create this painting -- I will share even more about her, later.

Then came the years of high school, and I was sent to the city of Sta. Cruz, Laguna to join in an inter-school art competition. The bus going to Sta. Cruz /Pagsanjan was speeding down the National Highway and was passing down those several verdant kilometers between the towns of Pila and Victoria. It was a sunny 9-o-clock in the morning, and my mind -- and later my oil pastels and poster paper -- was seized with yet another sight -- farmers busily rooting weeds, waist deep in emerald rice fields gently dancing in the crisp sunlight. Such scenes may be seen on either side of the National Highway linking Laguna with the other southern provinces, just by the few weeks before the emerald-green of the rice plants turn into yellow gold. And yes, there is another mountain at view -- the equally mysterious Mt. Banahaw, revered by many Filipinos as a holy mountain.

And then there was the sea. To be honest, the sea prefigures largely in almost all of my paintings. For most of the happiest memories with my family, and later in my social life, were interpersed with the smell and tang of salt water. Above is my oil-pastel recollection of a trip in the coast of Agoo, La Union, which is Northern Luzon. It was May, and riding a fast native boat fitted with an engine, we sped across the surface of the Bay at sunset. It was around 5:14 PM when I became a witness to an unbelievable, serendipitous phenomena -- when at that magical hour, all the elements of nature seemed to be inexorably united in their own version of the Vespers. The setting sun throwing scarlet fire on the congregation of undulating waves; it also seems to light the altar of the sea, its dying light projecting a luminous aisle of some celestial cathedral. The same votive sun is illuminating the vault of the macarel sky. Even if it was years ago, I still could not forget that moment when I became a witness and participant to the magnificent Celestial Vespers of the Sea.

Now, it is my urgent responsibilty to share you all about the spectacular and fleeting beauty of nature, right here in the Philippines. I feell an urgency to do so even if it means that I have to show it in my paintings. For all of the beauty that inspired this all might prove to be as fleeting as a soap bubble in the eyewink of time. For already, as a side effect of the inexorable tide of progress due to globalization, all the places that are depicted in these paintings are endangered of being malignedand destroyed altogether. And in my last visits to Makiling in August 2003 and December 2006, I saw some large houses propped up the slopes where tall trees were -- and sadly, some of the slopes have been cleared for farming and subdivision housing. And on 2003, I saw a mountain river bank already littered with trash left by numerous visitors who ironically, came to enjoy the mountain on the weekends! Blasphemy!

Once in an Earth Day Special from the National Geographic, just this year's Earth Day celebration, one of the scientists said that everyone's effort counts right now, "What you can do, if you can do anything to spread the message and help preserve the Earth, do it now. For your effort, what you can do right now, really counts" -- or as far as what I can recall from her. Now, I am doing my effort to convince people to help preserve the environment, by convincing them at least through these first 3 paintings that Mother Nature is worth saving for, because firstly, she -- like Mt. Makiling to me though -- is totally beautiful.

May it be that in the end, that children in latter times, will never suffer the instance to see and enjoy the beauty of Mt. Makiling, the emerald green of the rice fields, and the glory of the sea -- only on framed pieces of canvas.