Martino Abellana

This afternoon, 2 p.m., Wednesday 18 February 2015, Kinutil’s Raymund L. Fernandez is doing a presentation on Martino Abellana at the SM Cebu Art Center. The lecture is about Abellana’s teaching method and his position in Cebuano art history.

Martino Abellana was one of his teachers in 1976 when he enrolled in the University of the Philippines Cebu  Fine Arts Program. He was his teacher in the Techniques and Painting series of courses. Martino Abellana inevitably would have some influence on him both as a student and later on a teacher of the fine arts program. As a student he went on many occasions with his classmates on painting trips to Carcar where he got to know him better. To his surprise, he had quite an exposure to American experimental music, for example, the music of John Cage, Led Zeppelin, etc. which came from time to time into his conversations with students. He had a record player that he used to play his favorite albums.

Abellana joined the very first Mindworks festival in the mid-1980s putting his paintings in a closed room and then going about the ribbon-cutting ritual even if the paintings themselves were never shown. This was his take on conceptual art.

This tells us immediately that Martino Abellana was far more than what we would immediately see when we look at his portfolio of extant works, the life-drawings in pencil, the water colors, the landscape paintings, some abstract works, and portraits, which admittedly form the majority of his body of works.

One is excused to wonder: Which was Martino Abellana’s greater contribution to Cebuano art history? His work as a teacher? Or the art that he did?

Quite certainly his work as an art teacher would have just as much impact on local history as his art. And he distinguishes himself by his methodical pedagogy, which was consistent with the Cebuano temperament and reflective of current literature related to the teaching of basic drawing and painting.

At the core of this teaching is the dictum that one must learn to “see” if one wants to learn how to draw and paint. This concept of learning how to see has much to do with Impressionist approaches to the drawing and painting crafts.

The Impressionists were originally called the “Color Divisionists.” This means that their painting, especially their coloring approaches required them to see light and shade as well as color in terms of flat spaces. These flat spaces defined the distribution of light and shade on the object and consequently its volume. The edges of these flat spaces would then be softened or blended using pointillist strokes of color or various techniques of glazing.

But before teaching his students color, Abellana made them go through a rigorous training with the use of charcoal on paper. Line and value are two elements of form which were fundamental to his training approach in drawing.

Martino Abellana occupies a pivotal position in the development of Cebuano artistic history. If there is now a kind of flowering of Cebuano artistic culture, it is partly because of him. And yet we should not look at him in isolation of his peers.

He is of a generation of professional Cebuano artists preceded by the generation of Raymundo “Rey” Francia and Canuto Avila, et. al. Abellana was only one of a generation which includes the late Julian Jumalon and Carmelo Tamayo who is still alive and well.

An overview of Cebuano artistic history is a major part of the  lecture. One of its goals is to present the public with a graphic overview of Cebuano art history. Kinutil invites you to attend and interact.