A painter’s untimely passing

He would walk out on you if you didn’t don’t show up on time, one reason some people didn’t like the artist Tito Cuevas. Promptness is a trait uncommon to artists. But Tito must have gotten the habit from years of being an executive for the local branch of  Philippine Airlines. He had to see to it that planes flew and arrived on time. Running the national flag carrier, he could not afford to buy “Filipino time” as an excuse for being late.

Yet, paradoxically, it was a bit  late for him to discover his true passion. During  visits to the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, he encountered the works of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Franz Klein.

He was so overwhelmed by the energy and power exuded by the bold calligraphic strokes on the huge canvases from staring at them for a long time at the gallery. It was as if he was taken over by some spirit, the same inner force that guided the artist’s hand and was now pushing him to do the same.

Tito then decided to quit his job, leaving behind  a hefty salary for what was then a bleak future as an artist. He enrolled in Fine Arts in the University of the Philippines Cebu Campus and started his new life as an artist.

But Tito was persistent, learning to draw from his teachers, among them the Cebuano master Martino Abellana, whose traditional style he would later abandon. Being a late bloomer, he couldn’t wait to try the more exciting approaches of modern art, which itself came rather late in the local art scene.

He saw the great movement  with his own eyes during his travels in Europe and  the United States. Art was undergoing great change and artists around the world were caught in the great debates that came in its wake.

Yet, while Cebu was rapidly urbanizing in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, local artists remained stuck in the idyllic representations of the pastoral in the style of the ancient masters. It was, for Tito, art that did not reflect its time.

Thus driven by a dissenting spirit, he would create series after series of abstract paintings, his own tribute to a global movement to rid art of superfluous decoration, distracting narratives, and obvious cultural references in favor of pure form and mute feeling hinted only through a gesture of the artist’s hand.

The pursuit of immutable form also led Tito to Medieval icon painting, whose techniques he would learn when he trained in art conservation in Manila. Some of his artist friends were surprised by the sudden shift to this ancient technique, which they mistook for mere repetition.

In fact, Tito had only sincere admiration for the spirituality of Medieval painting whose bold outlines, flat colors, and geometric patterns anticipated the expressive distortions of modern painting. Using gold leaf and tempera on wood panels, he made his own religious icons following ancient conventions, although slightly adding his own touch.

Known for his generosity, Tito commissioned a local machine shop to build an etching press for his studio, perhaps wanting to roll out prints he could sell at a cheaper price or give away.

He thus became one of the first practitioners and promoters of modern printmaking in Cebu being the only artist in a long time to have a personal etching press. Etching, a technique in which a drawing is incised permanently into a metal plate using corrosive acids, is quite a difficult process that involves highly toxic chemicals.

Exposure to such materials eventually took its toll on the artist, who was also said to have smoked a lot in his younger days. He developed lung cancer, a disease he would fight for years. He finally succumbed to it last Monday morning, ending what was a great life story told only to a few and belied by the seemingly inarticulate colors and textures of his paintings.

In his homily during the cremation Mass the day after Tito’s death, artist-priest Jason Dy, S.J., said that the abstractionist titled his works “So Be It”, implying surrender to the “same God he sought to portray in painting”.

Death made the abstract concrete.

“The pain he used to suggest only in painting became all too real,” Fr. Jason said.

Tito couldn’t take it any longer and had to walk out on those of us who were just too slow in giving recognition.