Workshop in San Francisco

Without any hesitation, I said yes to Melanie Boteros, a public school teacher in the fishing municipality of San Francisco (formerly called Anao-awon) in Surigao del Norte, when she invited me recently to conduct a workshop for students in their community.

As a  Surigaonon, I took it as an opportunity to visit my hometown and take a short vacation. But more than that, it was the thought of being able to teach art to kids in my place who, like me when I was their age, never really had much opportunity to be exposed to art.

The two-day workshop and art competition was sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Surigao del Norte is rarely a recipient of government funding for art activities. I asked my chairperson  in the Department of Fine Arts to consider my workshop in San Francisco as part of our Community Extension Services  so I could take a leave from my teaching duties.

Herself a Surigaonon, she immediately approved.

The town of San Francisco is located about 20 to 30 minutes drive along the scenic coastal highway from Surigao City. The place has a clean pebble beach with rock formations and a cave carved on a hill facing the sea. Most people in San Francisco are small farmers and fisherfolk who are proud that their place has remained peaceful even during elections.

Among the town residents are Mamanua lumads who, unlike before, now increasingly send their kids (albeit still mostly girls) to school, making them more adjusted to the lifestyles of those in the lowlands. In her speech during the opening of our workshop, the lady mayor stressed the importance of maintaining local identity and traditions amid growing urbanization.

Indeed, Surigao City’s urban sprawl is heading towards San Francisco. Right now, the town still has a handful of private beach resorts so locals can just freely have picnics at the beach or take a dip to look at coral reefs in the sea that is declared a protected marine sanctuary.

I am hoping that San Francisco residents will continue to protect their beautiful beach as public domain and not give in to short-term lures of mass tourism and commercialization. Perhaps the community can manage the beach as a cooperative or communal enterprise with every family getting a share of income.

I look forward to this possibility and thus decided to teach kids there art techniques that utilize materials readily obtained from their surroundings and may be reproduced as souvenirs. I taught them soil painting and monotype and woodcut printmaking.

The place abounds with soil that come in all sorts of color and texture, and we use them as pigments for painting on canvas. To make them stick to canvas, we use acrylic emulsion, a clear glue that plasticizes when dry. Acrylic emulsion is commonly used as protective layer for wood and even masonry so it’s available in most hardware stores. Canvas is also a common fabric that is easily obtained from any textile store.

I chose to teach the children monotype and woodcut printmaking as they are techniques that don’t require the use of an etching press. In monotype, the artist reproduces images drawn with a stick on a layer of ink on a plexiglass plate by simply hand-pressing paper on it. In woodcut printing, the image is carved on a wood block and then inked and printed by hand-pressing the paper with a spoon.

The artist may chose to print a limited edition, carefully numbering every print. But, like the traditional Japanese woodcut printers, the artist may also decide to print as many as he or she wants.

Prints may therefore be sold as souvenirs, enabling the artist to express local identity and also earn along the way.

So  for two days, the children of San Francisco got their hands dirty as we made prints and soil paintings on canvas. Helping me in the workshop is the resident sculptor Fred Sagang, who shared my delight in seeing local kids, among them a group of shy Mamanua lumads, spend a couple of days making art.

We visited Manong Fred in his studio and saw a still limbless Christ carved on a single piece of log, a work in progress. He is  about to retire from carving and is worried that no one in his community is taking his place, not even his own grandchildren.

But during the competition, when we judged the works of the workshop participants, he was all smiles. The students learned fast, he said. We both can’t wait to see those paintings mounted in an exhibition in the town hall this December.