Janine Barrera-Castillo’s “Elemental Light” is ongoing at the Qube Gallery in Crossroads. She invites interested readers to her “artist’s reception” at 6 p.m. this Thursday, 23 July 2015 at the same venue.
Janine was one of the late Martino Abellana’s “favorite” students. Stated another way, Martino Abellana was her favorite teacher in UP Cebu College in the mid-1980s when she was a student in the Fine Arts Program there.
She recalls asking in one class what Abellana found to be an important question: “What is abstract art?”
She did not take a course under Abellana until she was in her 3rd year.
But even before this, she always felt that her question, simple as it sounded to her, earned her some special attention from Abellana. He would have been by then a regular lecturer for almost 10 years at the UP College Cebu. The Bachelor of Fine Arts is a 4-year program.
She visited him at his residence in Carcar “almost every Sunday” in her 3rd and 4th years as a student.
She and a classmate, Meowix Flores, would arrive in Carcar in the morning, and eat lunch with the Abellana family.
In the early afternoon, she would go off with her teacher and any other of his other students who were there, to paint landscapes at any of the many idyllic sites in Carcar; Sunday afternoons with the master.
Her effort paid off when in 1983 she won both Representational and Abstract categories of the Joya Awards competition, which competition the late National Artist (posthumous) Jose Joya sponsored just for the fine arts program he helped found in 1975.
She won another Joya Award a year later, the same year she graduated her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.
She went to UP Diliman after this to work for her Masters of Fine Arts.
However, in July, 1986, she won the “Study in the US” scholarship of the Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr Foundation sponsored by Philamlife, Philippine subsidiary of the American International Group.
She studied at the Academy of Arts in San Francisco.
Her masters thesis was around the theme: “The negation of color.”
This might have been motivated by her inner urge to “outgrow” the prior influences of her old teacher Martino Abellana. Color theory was the core of the Abellana pedagogy. And she needed to unlearn this, at least for the meantime, as a ritual perhaps to declare independence so that she might move forward with her art.
Her thesis exhibit featured only monochromatic works.
From then on, Janine goes through the travails of ordinary life as an expatriate in the United States resolving personal issues about her life and her art. A creativity coach helps her return to painting.
“Prepare your studio. Make friends with your artistic self once again,” was her most helpful advice. Thus in 2002 she presented another show in San Francisco exhibiting 8 large-scale abstract works, mostly 5ft. by 7ft. in size.
“Elemental Landscape” is her first time to show in Cebu since she left. Her artist’s statement opens: “My paintings begin with a live perception of nature. Each morning for an hour, I walk through a landscape of oak trees, green hills and open sky. This is the natural environment that I live in, which inevitably finds its way into my studio and into my paintings…”
There is a narrative here then. It is the arch of a necessary “rebellion” of a former apprentice against her former master, which for Janine Barrera-Castillo resolves certain elemental things about her life and art.
How does the arch fall?
The paintings tell a story, which might as well be titled, “A Return to Color.”
But perhaps the Impressionist side of her late master, Martino Abellana, might truly have preferred, “A Return to Light.”