The masters and our memories

(excerpt from my journal entry on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 2011, a Tuesday)

I remember years ago, I did a painting of a fallen leaf of an Indian tree with a white flower on it. A girl saw it at the office where I brought it for display. I wasn’t around when it happened, but the girl started crying daw when she saw it. Not just crying, but sobbing, and I was wondering if my paintings can really move people. Just like Van Gogh’s? I don’t know.


To me, Van Gogh’s colors do move, and his colors are alive. But it’s hard to not think if the emotional response to Van Gogh’s paintings is more due to the romanticism associated with his life. There’s this song (“Vincent” by Don Mclean) about him, a sad song tribute to Van Gogh. But how much of it has seeped into our consciousness and influences the way we look at Van Gogh is, I suppose, subject to inquiry.

But personally, I see “Van Gogh” in my life in dark, quiet evenings, when everyone’s asleep and the streets are deserted, and everything is still. There’s a dignified desperation about such scenes for me—a night for the sleep of the sad and weary. In my mind, I hear the flutes from Bach’s…what’s it called again?...let me check…ah, it’s “Er hat uns allen wohlgetan” from the St. Matthew Passion. Brings to mind yet another painting, “The Night Tryst”—an Indian painting showing an Indian woman waiting for her lover in the forest, and the animals around her sympathize with her under a starlit sky. Amidst the quiet, the desperation is there. Because her lover has not yet come.

I remember many years ago, when I was still a child, I remember there was this night when I came home from playing with the neighbors’ kids, and I found my nanay sitting outside in the yard. She looked so tired because she had been supervising the renovations being done in our house at the time. The carpenters had long already left, and there was clutter everywhere, and everything was so quiet and still around the house. The only sound was the humming of the electricity coming from the light bulb just above my mother. I gave my mother a hug and rested my head on her lap, and she told me, “Matulog ka na.” I was indeed very tired, but I didn’t feel sleepy because I felt sad (or began to feel sad by then) because my mother was telling me to go to sleep, and she was tired herself but she wouldn’t go to sleep yet. She was waiting. I don’t know for what or for whom.

I still remember that scene to this day, and get sentimental whenever I come home late nights and see quiet, deserted streets while on the jeepney or while walking. I guess that memory somehow influences the way I contemplate Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” “Starry Night,” or “The Night Café,” which is one of my emotional favorites. I guess that’s why I like quiet evenings, staying up late just so for the experience of heightened introspection(?) or sentimental exploration(?), I don’t know for sure. Who cares? Haha.

When I started painting (or learning to paint), I exposed myself to a lot of the old masters—Vermeer, Velazquez, Goya, Rembrandt, etc. Those years, as of yet, I consider the brightest and most colorful years of my life. I was not living in the Netherlands or Spain, but I feel like I lived in those places at the time of the old masters. Is that how artists feel about life as they immerse in the art of those they admire? Do they live with altered memories? By “altered memories,” I mean I remember living my life with family and friends back then, but there’s this extra dimension or aspect in my life that somehow outshines the other aspects of my memory of those years. The brightness of those days was like the brightness of Vermeer’s light, of the glitter of the gold in Goya’s or Rembrandt’s works. And the nights were like Manet’s in “The Barmaid” or in Van Gogh’s night scenes. I didn’t actually live them, but man, they’re so alive to me, so vivid to me. I guess that’s how powerful free association is. (Free association is a psychology term, by the way. I’ve not the patience to explain it here, so…).

I plan to make use of my drawing notebooks as a journal also. Just like what I do here (journal). I plan to make at least 1 drawing a day, until it’s become a habit with me. By then, I would be living like the intellectuals of the old days, before the advent of computers and word processors, and my backpack would have two notebooks (one for drawing and one for writing) as basic provision. Wow! That’s exciting. I’d be out of this world, and I’d be so weird, everyone would avoid me. Ahehe. A few more lines and I’ll be done with this page. What else to write? Hmm…Esep-esep. It’s almost lunch. I can smell the saltiness of the patis in the nilagang buto-buto (spare ribs) in the kitchen. Hmm… Sarap! I’ll rest my hand a bit after this, then have lunch, then give Tatay a bath. After that, I don’t know what else to do. Bahala na. Chapter muna! Thank God for these two pages! : )