My Art

 I just received a very interesting query from a very good friend of mine, Dave Buenviaje, definitely a connoisseur of the arts who has gone to different museums in Europe and other places with his wonderful wife, Drea, marveling at the masters. I am very much pleased that he would take notice of my work - enough to pique his interest and pose a query. It goes something like this:

"Tito Rolly, serious question... but hope it lands well. Your style is like the furtherance of a conversation with the great HR Ocampo. Is this a conscious effort, or is there a historical, artistic connection that ties you to that style? How you're pushing the works is very interesting. Sana art historians will see this"

This question made me ponder and try to understand how my style came to be. This is what i have come up with:

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It is quite interesting that you would have been reminded of H.R. Ocampo viewing my work. I can understand where this is coming from. He is one of my favorite Filipino painters alongside Cesar Legaspi, Vicente Manansala and Botong Francisco. As you can probably have noticed, their styles border on cubism as well.

My style is brought about by a project in college. In that project, I experimented overlapping the colors with a different color resulting from the merger ex. the juxtaposition of yellow and blue – resulting in green. It is that very basic concept that I try to capture in my paintings. The project I am referring to is somewhat of a Tsuru bird as it takes off amid a landscape of a field and a big, robust sun. You could just imagine that my palette was generally warm colors. I liked what I saw, but did not do anything about it. It was later on in life, while trying to develop a style, that I am reminded of the experiment and over time had made improvements on it. What I would do is draw several targeted forms, mostly people and apply overlapping colors resulting in transparent figures, hence the name transparent cubism, a name made popular by Manansala which and I decided to call my style..

So, my style is the interplay of colors that would from cubes unintentionally, hence its cubist tendencies further developing, this time, consciously and intentionally into transparent figures. The forms, when viewed from afar and without any effort to dissect the overall appearance would look like H. R. Ocampo’s design. However, a closer inspection of the work would reveal figures which would probably be reminiscent of Legaspi, Manansala and to some extent, Botong Francisco. Having looked at their works, admiring their skill somewhat rubbed off on me, I guess. So there! Not exactly a treatise, but nevertheless an explanation of what style my work is trying to conjure.

Magnificat

Oil on Canvas

20 X 30 in

Anticipated Vibrations

Oil on Canvas

                    30 x 30 in