DANNY PANGAN'S PASSION FOR QUAINTNESS

By Arnel Mirasol

DANNY PANGAN belongs to that breed of Filipino painters who put a premium on nostalgia. The former director of the University of the East (UE) School of Music and Fine Arts, the late Florencio Concepcion, was the first to put a finger on this when he labeled Danny Pangan's paintings as nostalgic realist. Bencab's series on turn-of-the-century Filipinas in baro't saya, Isagani Fuentes' paintings of pre-Spanish jars and artifacts, and Dominic Rubio's old Binondo denizens with charming stick necks are prime examples of nostalgic art, that people nowadays would unhesitantly call throwback art. (below right).

Painting by Bencab

Painting by Isagani Fuentes

Painting by Dominic Rubio

The surrealists' esoteric themes that delve into the workings of the subconscious, and even of the occult, are not for Pangan: nor is the pop artists' concern with contemporary icons. It is the past that Pangan wants to dissect.

In the seventies, Lino Severino came out with his vanishing scene series, a masterly near abstract depictions of Spanish era houses on their way to "extinction." Although Severino was not the first to use facades of old houses as subject matter in painting - but Elias Laxa who was active in the fifties - still his suite of old houses was groundbreaking. It spawned a host of imitators who specialized in doing paintings of bahay na bato. Their paintings, although also masterly done, were just a rehash of the vanishing scene paintings of the master Severino. 

It was Danny Pangan who did innovate, when he incorporated in his paintings (below) wood reliefs that make art historians ambivalent on how to categorize his artworks. Pangan's pieces straddle the divide separating painting from relief sculpture. Not only that, his works can also be said to be participatory because the viewers are put into the role of visitors in a bahay na bato looking out the window and seeing outside an old house or a church. That is a witty device, and original too, as far as I know.  Sure, there were window paintings in the past - but they are just that, paintings. Pangan's pieces on the other hand, are like an architect's or interior designer's 3-D mock-up. His interior scenes have windows that are almost "life-like", so to speak,  complete with wooden sills. jambs, and carved-wood head adornments.

Morong Church, Bataan 1

Morong Church, Bataan 2

View from the Grand House

Old Baler Church

But a shift seems to have occurred. Pangan now includes human figures in his relief works as can be seen in a piece titled Botong's Two Assistants (below). This piece looks like a homenaje - a tribute or homage - to painting masters he looks up to, like Botong Francisco, Tam Austria, and Al Perez. Botong's Two Assistants also differ in another way from Pangan's previous artworks because what can be seen outside the window is no longer an old structure, but a depiction of the age-old Filipino tradition of bayanihan.  That bayanihan image is a collage. It is the mural-sized painting by Botong Francisco used as cover art for a coffee-table  book. The image was printed on canvas using an inkjet printer (giclee), and glued within the window frame.

This shift is worth noting, because it points to us the path that Pangan may traverse in the development of his iconography. His interior scenes, now peopled, remain. Perhaps, what we'll see outside the windows of Pangan's future works are genre scenes of people of long ago doing their cyclical routines like planting rice, cockfighting, and buying and selling at the market.

Pangan was born in Lapaz, Tarlac, and lived for several years in Tondo,Manila, where he finished elementary and high school, before finally settling in Malolos, Bulacan. I have not seen much of Malolos as of yet, although I went there on bike twice to see the Barasoain Church and its old convento. Malolos is now a city, but I presume that it has not yet lost its quaintness. 

But it was in the equally quaint Intramuros that Pangan's artistic epiphany serendipitously occurred. Pangan related to me that he got the idea of doing window paintings, when he was once inside the Rizal Shrine in Fort Santiago, and saw outside the window the bell tower of the Manila Cathedral. That was in 1978, and the first window paintings he came up with at the time were without the carved wooden reliefs that he'll be known for later on. It was only in 1984, during the Fourth Asean Art Festival in Manila, that he first exhibited, at the Rear Room Gallery, the first in his series of 3D paintings.

Pangan was a Fine Arts graduate from the University of the East, where he majored in Advertising. His first job after graduation was as art instructor at Bulacan State University's Institute of Architecture and Fine Arts. He later on worked in advertising agencies in Dubai, Jeddah, and Kuwait as senior visualizer and art director. Pangan has had ten solo shows both here and abroad. He had exhibited several times in the United States, Hongkong, Indonesia, and the Middle East. Pangan had won a slew of awards here, the latest and most prestigious of which is the Gawad Bayani at Bituin para sa Sining Biswal (Hero and Star Award for the Visual Arts) awarded him by the City of Malolos (left). Of the awards, honors, and distinction that he'd received - which included a Saudia travel grant and major prizes in two Hispanic Week painting competitions among others - I'm sure that Pangan cherish the most this one given him by Malolos. Malolos is the city of his affections. Its quaint ambience is the impetus that prod him to continue doing the art he does, which is a looking back with nostalgic longing to what some say was a more genteel era,

Tag PhotoAdd LocationEdit

Like ·  · Stop Notifications · Sha

AN ILLUSTRATOR'S MANIFESTO

By Arnel Mirasol

(This manifesto was used as wall text for my 2007 solo exhibit of illustrations and paintings at the Crucible Gallery. The remark I made here about a few Picasso imitators as second-rate artists have raised the hackles of some who felt alluded to. Well, allow me to clear things up. I'm not referring to all Picasso imitators, nor to all modernist painters for that matter. The fellows I have in mind were those who haven't gone through the whole route of first learning the rudiments of realist drawing and painting before adopting abstraction or modernist figuration as their style.)

Photo shows me in 2003 while working on The Frog Prince.

I once consulted a fellow painter for advice. I asked him if it is all right for me to mount as my first solo show an exhibition of picture book illustrations. He said no, and I asked him why. "Strategy," he replied: by which he meant, I surmised, that a painter must avoid being labeled an illustrator at the start of his career. Get known as a painter first, then dabble in illustration later.

Implicit in my friend's response is the veiled disdain felt by some painters for illustrators. The matter is made worse by my firsthand observation that some gallery owners themselves are also infected with that conceit. Prior to being okayed by the Crucible Gallery, my exhibit proposal for my first solo show of fairy tale illustrations was rejected by four galleries. One gallery owner even dismissed my work with a smirk, which made me feel pathetic indeed. She at least could have softened the blow by explaining that my work will look incongruous in a gallery with a penchant for showing angst-ridden paintings.

But no matter, I know that in time, I can somehow prove my point that there are only second-rate artists, not second-rate art forms.

Before focusing my energies on illustration, I did paintings with proletarian themes Those are grim works, which may perhaps partly explain why they never were commercially successful. Today, in my work as illustrator, what is grim is no longer my artworks' subject matter, but my determination to push my standard to my highest limit. In my more than ten years in picture book illustration, I have never once considered it a breeze  compared to painting. The opposite is true, because the parameters in picture book illustration are many and exacting. There is a manuscript to dissect, an editor to please, and the child readers to entertain. Whereas in painting, you can just affect the nonchalant pose of a recluse and please only yourself.

In our art scene, there appeared from time to time a few Picasso imitators who flaunted nothing but canvases filled with Picassoesque doodles and distortions. But something was glossed over in their posturing. They conveniently forgot that Pablo had mastered the technique of Classical Realism by his fifteenth year. These ersatz Picassos have leapfrogged. Although not yet adept in the two-dimensional construction of the human form, they proceeded forthwith to deconstruct it. And presto, they then wore with pride the label "modernist."

Lest I be accused of inviting controversy, I do not of course insinuate that all modernists are poseurs. Far from it. I sincerely admire the works of Arturo Luz, Malang, Prudencio Lamarrosa, Marcel Antonio, and many other modernists. And I intend to one day align myself with them and be a modernist painter too. But no leapfrogging for me. I reserve my disdain only for those who mask their ineptness in the realist technique with the camouflage of modernism. They are the second-rate artist I am alluding to.

I repeat, there is no second-rate art form. Each art form, be it painting, book illustration, animation, digital graphics, etc., is as good as any. What counts is the practitioner's level of competence. And competence I think is what I've shown in my suite of Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm fairy tale illustrations - discipline also, and patience. And courage too - the courage to stare back at the poverty that stared me in the face. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. For among the publishers that I have worked for, my present publisher Reni Roxas of Tahanan Books is the most generous. She never hesitated to offer me fees way beyond the going rate of other publishers.

But with the actual art making process stretched into more than a year, the whole enterprise seemed to cease being lucrative. But believe me, money is never a factor in my success equation. What I've set out to do when I embarked on this project was to create works that will compare not too unfavorably with the world's best. I may have fallen short of my goal, but who cares. I have done what I can and completed my best work yet. I have wielded with much agony the tool that I'm most familiar with - my adeptness in a certain realist technique that another fellow painter said borders on the obsessive. And that proves another point - that we illustrators are also capable of suffering in the pursuit of excellence in our art. And that we too have our own angst, like any starving painter.

The Frog Prince