Simplify

The late great artist Martino Abellana is remembered fondly by his students. One of the most fundamental rules he taught could be written in a single word: Simplify. It is late afternoon years ago when he writes this down on the blackboard in capital letters: SIMPLIFY. And he would repeat it several times in the course of trying to explain what he meant: simplify, simplify, simplify… Until it sounded like an incantation. If his students missed most of his techniques they should at least get this most fundamental one: simplify.

There was another reason he had an obsession for this word aside from the fact it is essential in learning art. It was also because he was a student of Fernando Amorsolo. Both he and his teacher followed after the Impressionists, the movement that some writers say is the first movement of Modernism.

The impressionists called themselves “color divisionists.” They separated color into their roots, usually a primary color and a secondary one, when they painted spaces into their canvases. With this technique they were able to capture the brilliance of light itself. And they were able to capture the illusion of light vibrating through the atmosphere as it travelled the distance between the object and viewer’s eyes. This technique of looking at color as light came to artists even as Isaac Newton was writing the “Laws of Optics,” one of his first great contributions to physics.

But before the impressionists could apply what they knew of light into the discipline of painting they needed first of all to divide the painting into a simplified arrangement of colored spaces. This technique of dividing what they saw into spaces required a mastery of the ability to simplify the visual phenomenon into a manageable process, a technique for drawing and painting. To understand this better, one has to understand that visual phenomena is always a complex of various stimuli. If one intellectually accounted for all of the visual elements, the mind would be overpowered by their complexity.

Take for instance a simple sphere. The number of different shades and color which describes its volume in its minutiae is so infinitesimal it is mind boggling. And so what the painter does is to reduce them into simplified spaces. Say, five, counting from the area with the most light to the darkest shade. What the impressionists did was to demonstrate that even such a simplification was enough to produce on the canvas an excellent account of the object itself. Not only that, they proved that such a simplified if illusory account of the object could be more beautiful than the object itself. This technique became for them a “language” that gave them the ability to describe the world in a manner that went even beyond the constraints of the object itself as it appeared in nature. This act of transcending the constraints of the object’s natural appearance opened the doors to other art movements that followed, post impressionism, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, etc.

But everything begins from the mastery of the act of simplification. This mastery is not at all the sole province of art. It is required for all disciplines and professions. Or better said: it is a requirement for a truer understanding of the world in general.

For the world that we see is always infinitely complex. So complex, our minds would be overwhelmed unless we learned how to simplify it into its most fundamental parts. Say five, if we went by Abellana. While indeed, this act of simplifying requires that we discount some elements as extraneous, the end result is not to make the object itself less visible or distorted. The end result is to show the object as if we were viewing it from a greater distance, surely, but also with greater clarity. As the impressionists would have it, until we can see the light itself bouncing from the object and then passing through the air between us and the object. In other words, until we saw the “whole picture.” The impressionists showed us a way not just of painting but of looking at and understanding the world. And it is a way which applies not just to what can be seen but to all things apprehensible.

Take the Reproductive Health bill and what would happen if it passes. Some say the bill would be to the discredit of the Catholic church in the Philippines. Quite certainly we would finally become just one religion in a nation of many religions and persuasions. What if we Catholics will now finally have to practice and teach Catholicism from wherever we are instead of from a position of political privilege? Such a development would definitely signal radical change. It would tell us that the times have changed since the time of the friars and Dr. Jose Rizal.

Quite certainly, that would pose a great challenge to all Catholics here. But it would also rid the church of so much historical and political baggage. Such baggage as would translate into that frightfully dreadful description: “the only Catholic nation in Asia.” It would put our own Catholicism inside a new context, to be sure. But it would be the truer context. So that we can not now presume we are Catholic just because we are Filipino. We would have to start calling ourselves Catholic Filipinos. And that act of acquiring true identity would require all of us finally to take into account those things that do make us true Catholics. As for those things which make us true Filipinos, we would have served that already just simply by leaving the politicians alone to make their final decision.