In 1935, Manuel Rodriguez, a talented young Cebuano, arrived in Manila full of dreams of being an artist. Although having only few pennies in his pocket, he immediately enrolled in the University of the Philippines School of Fine Arts where he would be under some of the big names of Philippine art: Fernando Amorsolo, Guillermo Tolentino, Fabian de la Rosa, etc.
While trained in the rudiments of the classical academic art, which was then the official style of the school that patterned itself after the Academy in Madrid, Rodriguez was also exposed to the ongoing debate on modern art between the classicist sculptor Tolentino and the young modernist champion, the painter Victorio Edades who had just arrived from the US. The class in engraving also impressed the young Cebuano artist who explored other techniques of printmaking.
The rise of modernism in the Philippine art scene after the war had a strong influence on Rodriguez who saw its iconoclastic character as best expressed in the similarly experimental nature of printmaking. He promoted printmaking through workshops, exhibits and opening his own galleries showing his prints and work by other artists. He wanted to counter the notion of printmaking as “minor” art and for this advocacy he came to be known later as the “Father of Printmaking in the Philippines.”
In 1968, a year after Manila hosted the First Inter-Asian Graphic Arts Festival, Mang Maning founded the Philippine Association of Printmakers (PAP), an organization that aims to promote the art of printmaking to the Filipino public. It proved to be one of the longest running art organizations in the country as the PAP, (now renamed Association of Pinoyprintmakers) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The historic event is marked with an exhibit entitled “Tirada” that opened May 19 and still running until July 15, 2018 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
According to the show’s curator, art critic Patrick Flores, “the exhibition is built around a range of concerns: the aesthetic integrity and intelligence of the work of the print and the status of the printmaker as an artist; the validity of appropriation within the artistic system of the print; the capacity of the print to respond to socio-political reality.”
Occupying the main and hallway galleries on the second and third floors of the CCP, the huge exhibition showcased the work of Mang Maning and other pioneers and masters of local printmaking such as Ben Cab, Pandy Aviado, Raul Isidro, Fil Delacruz, Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi, Ambie Abano, and many other younger artists who helped elevate print’s status as high art even as it also remains to be the most democratic of the visual arts.
I am privileged to have been invited to join this exhibition even if I am not officially a member of PAP. We had printmaking as a subject in college, but it was during the Cebu leg of the group’s traveling workshop in 2001 that I got to try working with an etching press under Pandy Aviado, Jess Flores, Benjie Torrado Cabrera, and Ambie Abano. In 2009, as part of a month-long art residency of the CCP, I and four other fellows spent a few days making prints at the PAP workshop in the Folk Arts Theater building.
During the last two times that Mang Maning returned to Cebu before he died in Florida in 2016, I assisted him in his workshops for art students. Today I teach my own printmaking classes.
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