A Small Window Shines on Botong’s Angono
A Small Window Shines on Botong’s Angono
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, December 02, 1987
THE sun set all-too-suddenly for the small town of Angono on March 31, 1969.
Award-winning young painter Orville Tiamson remembers it well, though he could not have been more than 3 or 4 years old at the time. Word sliced through town like a resonant wailing, cutting deep into his impressionable young mind. The great Carlos "Botong" Francisco had passed away in his prime, the tragic victim of whimsical fate.
The master was eventually laid to rest, borne on the town's shoulders like a sleeping god. Yet even in death, Botong never left Angono. His memory draped the land and its people like a mystic, holy shroud, persisting into the present as both legacy and curse.
Angono's sons and daughters would inherit Botong's stature as well as his shadow. And while this heritage would nurture them and guide their paths homeward, it would also hold them in willing bondage, lulling them into a deep slumber from which many of them would never awaken. The art of Angono has since become synonymous with the art of Botong Francisco, and the children of Angono will probably always be "Botong's children."
Thus, Orville Tiamson, born and raised in the town of Angono as part of a generation that was much too young to have ever met the master, still speaks of Botong like a surrogate father. His eyes wander off into the distance whenever he speaks of Botong's legendary achievements, his simple, folksy ways, and his abiding love for his hometown.
Orville's parents were Botong's friends, his own late father having formally studied painting in Manila before choosing, out of necessity, to pursue business interests instead. Orville remembers his father telling him that the great Botong worked for days on a stretch in a studio virtually devoid of sunlight and ventilation, and that this is what inevitably killed the master in the end.
Perhaps in a poetic sense, this very same boyhood dread of suffocation has motivated Orville to put up a small, well-appointed art gallery in the heart of Angono, much like an open window to the world. Here, Orville hopes, the influences of past and present can eventually come to terms, with the gallery itself providing a permanent forum for Angono's substantial artistic community.
It was with great interest, therefore, that my wife and I journeyed to Angono last Sunday in the company of other artists — a group that included painters Lao Lianben, Lilia Lao, Yuan Mor'O, and Kulay-Diwa proprietor Bobbit Nolasco — to view a hitherto-unexhibited suite of Botong's studies at the Tiamson Art Gallery.
Purely by chance, we had arrived on the eve of the annual fiesta, and already, a great deal of excitement was in the air. From lamp posts and rooftops hung tiny banners waving in the afternoon breeze, while uniformed brass bands marched up and down the narrow, winding streets to serenade the early revelers. There is a painting by Botong of just such a scene that hangs in our ancestral home, and its recollection brought to mind how little Angono had changed since the master's passing.
The works we had come to see would have been charming anywhere else, but viewing them here in the heart of Botong's Angono was an intense, if eerie, experience. Being pencil and watercolor studies on paper — many actually discolored, stained, or even torn in their original frames, with a few of the pieces annotated in the master's own energetic hand — these renderings were at once more intimate and personal, much like remnants of a separate reality long consigned to a fabled past. Having been culled entirely from the personal collection of a certain Dr. Abad, a man reputed to have been one of Botong's closest acquaintances, these studies were the spontaneous outpourings of a brilliant mind at work, seedlings that were later to bear fruit in the artist's lifetime mosaic, delicate morsels charged with the musty ambiance of his studio and the impulsive tick of his wrist.
Over refreshments, I was saddened to hear from Orville that Angono's tightly-knit artistic community had, thus far, refused to lend his gallery its support. Here was a well-planned exhibition facility at par with those in the big city, yet it was kept at arm's length and viewed with suspicion by the very sector of society it sought to service. Perhaps Orville's intentions of bringing urbanized artworks to Angono from time to time had struck a nerve, and in a mentality typical of small towns, many feared that the great Botong's ghost would be purged at its roots.
We took a short detour on the way home to visit the much publicized Balaw-Balaw Restaurant & Gallery where Manny Baldemor was exhibiting his own "Homage to Botong". The place was dark, cavernous and grimy, with most of the paintings hanging high up on the rafters or waist-level on the bamboo runners. In truth, Balaw-Balaw was more rustic dinner than artistic sanctuary, and Baldemor's simplistic works were more homage to Malang than to Botong. I began to understand how the master's precious memory might never be allowed to wander far from the cash register, and how young Orville Tiamson's long trek would be mostly uphill.
In the art trade, the old masters sleep only if we let them. Otherwise, they pay the rent long after they're gone.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Small Window Shines on Botong’s Angono” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, December 02, 1987
