* Note: This was another pitched piece that did not make it to the papers--or at least I don't think so!
Art as Destiny
Roy Veneracion at 60
By Niña Terol
There is something about art that makes it appear whimsical at first glance. Perhaps it’s because many of us equate colors, paintbrushes, and canvases to the idealized visions of youth—they are only passing fancies that tickle the mind while the gray realities of adulthood have not yet set in. There are others out there, however, for whom artmaking has become more than a playtime activity. For them, it begins as a whisper—a soft voice that suggests and seduces, and later on commands, rather insistently, that it be heard (and heard now).
For international visual artist Roy Veneracion, art is a statement of fact and being. It is an indelible imprint that cannot be questioned—defining what is, what always has been, and what always will be.
Having turned 60 this year, Veneracion looks back on over three decades of creating art and realizes that, for him, there was never a question of whether to pursue art, what style to employ, or what themes to focus on. For as long as he could remember, he has known that art would be his life path and his destiny—the one thing that would give him both the roots upon which to ground himself, and the wings with which to take flight.
“I’ve always enjoyed drawing since I was very young,” he shares. “I didn’t pass through childish drawings, like doodling in class—at a young age, I was already doing portraits of my cousins and my classmates, and was drawing even better than the adults were. I was designated the ‘artist’ in my class.”
“Since then, I have always known that art was my identity,” Veneracion confides. “I said to myself, ‘This is my role. I know where I am.’ I’ve always had art as my anchor.”
A self-taught painter
Having come from a family of artists (his aunt, Felicitas “Tita” Layag Radaic was a renowned ballerina and choreographer; his uncle, Bien Santos, was a student of Fernando Amorsolo; and even his late father, Atty. Geronimo Veneracion, could produce very good likenesses on paper and through sculpture), there was no questioning that innate creativity that the young Roy possessed.
“I was exposed to a lot of books (when I was growing up),” he shares. “Everything I could get my hands on—from the classics to comics—I would read. I would interpret whatever captured my imagination. Anything and everything that I could draw, from nature to my playmates, I would.”
He adds: “I used to have these ‘paint by numbers’—I got bored with them, but I learned how to use oil paint because of them.”
Every afternoon, as he walked home from the parochial school where we went, the young Roy would “linger by a sign shop where a master painter was endlessly painting huge portraits” of movie stars on large canvas billboards.
“He was painting so fast, and the likeness of FPJ then was very realistic—that I would stand there and just watch him. I learned a lot (about painting) just by watching him… There weren’t very many artists during my time, but these illustrators, these painters of billboards—they prepared the grounds for our generation (of artists).”
As it turns out, the young Veneracion had learned too much too fast that by the time he was studying Fine Arts in the University of the Philippines in Diliman in the late sixties (where he got in through “the University entrance exams and not the talent test that got you in through the side door”), one of his art professors had to send him out.
“I was getting all aces that my teacher. Professor Virginia Agbayani, told me that she had nothing more to teach me. ‘You can go on your own now,’ she told me. ‘Go ahead and experiment with whatever you want to do.’”
Their college thesis in UP at that time was turned into a contest where renowned artists were invited to judge. Veneracion won the first prize for his entry. For pocket money, the illustrious student did illustrations for the Wakasan Komiks and was paid Php75 for 2 to 3 pages of ink drawings.
“My style was kind of expressionistic, and I was told to practice more and be refined like the older illustrators,” Veneracion shares of his experience illustrating for Wakasan Komiks. “But that’s not where I wanted to be.”
An avant-garde artist
From the beginning of his artistic career, Roy Veneracion never had any qualms about being labeled “avant-garde.” He shares through his writings:
“I was initially concerned with uniting the dichotomies in abstract art practice. The geometric and expressionistic polarities, representing reason and intuition, symbolically, were reconciled in my work by means of a geometric divisionism that brimmed with impassioned markings, colors, and textures, but raised some eyebrows in the art establishment…”
Later on, other artists would adopt this style, but Veneracion would always be a step or two ahead of the rest—refusing to let the creative norms of the day overtake his need to branch out and explore art forms that the viewing public may not necessarily appreciate—yet.
“My approach to artmaking of testing untried combinations of techniques, of questioning established frameworks and attitudes, of cultivating stylistic inconsistencies and balancing visual contradictions, have led me to syncretism. [It is] the merging of opposing principles that carries implications going beyond art and leading all the way (at least in concept), to understanding, harmony, and peace.”
One might say that Veneracion’s approach to art is very risky given the Filipino viewing public’s taste for many things traditional, but the artist is definite about his approach.
“You cannot create new things if you’re on the safe side,” he asserts. “My art is dictated by my inner consciousness, my inner soul. My soul looks for it.”
Art as self-love
One may perhaps ascribe this kind of creative confidence to Veneracion’s Zen-like approach to artmaking. Free of the adolescent struggle “to art or not to art” and knowing early on that this is what he was meant to do, the introverted but eloquent artist has been able to develop and convey the kind of self-assuredness that allows one to test uncharted waters. For him, art is not a means “to belong” or “to be accepted,” it is a means to express one’s self-worth.
“My art has allowed me to understand my emotions,” he reveals. “It’s not that I am angst-free or ever was, I just do not want to specialize in angst as a subject matter of art—I like to express a wider range of human emotions, such as joy, hope, tenderness or humor, longing, disdain—even feelings for satire and rage… [My art] has allowed me to balance all aspects of my life [as an artist, a family man, an individual] and has taught me much about allowance and compassion. When you create art, you must do so with limitations—this teaches you to understand the limitations around you and to make [something good] out of these limitations.”
He is passionate about opening people’s minds and liberating their imaginations through his art.
“Even if you’re hungry, you’re [also] still hungry for something aesthetic,” he answered when asked about whether art is a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. “Even the tricycle drivers and the ordinary man on the street will have a poster or a flower vase at home; we all want to make our surroundings a little bit better.”
“I think it would be self-hate to consciously want things to remain ugly,” he asserts.
The Filipino as contemporary artist
It is this passion that fuels Veneracion’s drive to expose contemporary Filipino art to the rest of the world.
He writes: “I developed my theories [of Syncretism] around the eastern ‘yin-yang’ idea of finding ‘wholeness’ through the acceptance of the dualities in all experience. My attempt to resolve the contradictions inherent in the exchange of influences between East and West and the impact of the information age upon cultures, as well as the need to find the visual equivalents to contemporary thought and experience, led to this synthesis.”
It seems that Veneracion has hit upon a universal truth, as his works have been well-received internationally and have been exhibited in many important art centers worldwide. The Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, the Art Forum Gallery in Singapore, the Sepia Workshop in Soho, New York, and Gallery 8 of the famous Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, California, are only some of the renowned hosts of Veneracion exhibitions. He has also exhibited his works at the Segunda Bienal de la Havana at the Wilfredo Lam Museum in Havana, Cuba and the Asian Art Festival in Bandung, Indonesia, as well as in Germany, Canada, Korea, China, and a traveling exhibition of ASEAN nations’ artists. Here at home, his works have been on display at the National Museum of the Filipino People, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Philippine Art, among other collections. He was a recipient of the prestigious Thirteen Artists Award of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1990.
Even now, with all these and with over 35 years of artmaking under his belt, the youthful-looking Veneracion feels that he has much more to achieve. He is currently preparing for an international solo exhibition in February 2008—the first Filipino artist to be hosted by the L.A. Artcore Center in Los Angeles, California. He has also been tapped to lead a cultural exchange program between 10 Filipino artists and 10 American artists, which will take place between the Philippines and the United States in 2009.
“What you ask for in life is what you get,” the artist states. “I have always seen myself as a role model for other artists, and am striving to achieve a balance between creating art and achieving success. It can’t be just one or the other… When I conduct workshops in art I don’t tell my prodigies how to do art and what art to do, but rather, like a gardener, I liberate their imaginations that their artistry may bloom.”
Roy Veneracion is an artist who dances to the beat of his own drum. But he does so unapologetically because he knows that, someday, in the not-so-distant future, people will hear the tunes that he is playing, and they will recognize it as echoes of their own hidden voices.
