To all who did not catch the news: starting today at 5 pm up to the 24th June 2012, you have a rare chance to see a solo exhibition of recent works by Ramon Orlina at Rockwell, Makati. This is the first time his artworks are taken out of the confines of a gallery or museum into the more public atrium of the commercial Powerplant Mall.
The Exhibition, named “Brilliance,” is offered in celebration of Philippine Independence Day. Many of our heroes like Rizal and Luna were artists in their own right and “Brilliance” is a tribute to their brilliance.
You will also see why decades upon decades hence Ramon Orlina – Architect, Painter, Sculptor – will still be regarded worldwide as the great unique artist that he is now…
Glass Sculptor Ramon Orlina
The Gardener had a long interview with Ramon Orlina lately and all the while kept his mind from racing to another artist in another time in another world – Michelangelo Buonarotti.
It is said that Michelangelo, the greatest artist of all times, by far, had for a wet nurse a woman who was both the daughter and wife of stone-cutters in the village of Settignano near Florence that was famous for that craft so that, therefore, Michelangelo “suckled hammers and chisels with his nurse’s milk.” He may have started with painting and architectural designs but soon enough also embraced sculpture, which to his mind was the most challenging of the arts.
It is more than 500 years now since he got to work and the world still ogles his masterpieces in painting (Creation at the Sistine Chapel), and architecture (the Vatican itself), and wonders no end at the living realism in sculpture of David and Moses and the Pieta, among many.
Orlina started out in architecture, moved on to painting, and has ended up a great unique artist in sculpture.
Before Michelangelo tackled marble, he first sculpted terracotta, plaster and bronze. Lorenzo the Magnificent discovered him and the material basis of his artistic existence was assured.
Orlina was born and lives in Taal, Batangas – a town suffused with art and historical heritage starting with its imposing basilica and its myriad of wooden houses from the Spanish era, and significant artists like his own grandfather, Jim Hernandez. He took up architecture at the University of Santo Tomas whose quadricenntenial celebration was marked by the unveiling of an Orlina masterpiece, The Quattromondial Monument.
Photo by Paul Allyson R. Quiambao
He thus started out as architectural staff of a prominent firm but the early years of the Marcos martial law regime were not financially rewarding for the trade so that Orlina was moved to strike out on his own – going to painting on glass, apparently an old hobby. The value of his art was noticed immediately and admired by many establishments that soon enough the lords of the glass industry discovered him and easily assured him the material basis of his artistic existence, as the Medici’s did of old in Michelangelo’s Florence.
Victor Lim and Geronimo Velasco (Energy Secretary of Ferdinand Marcos), owners of Republic Glass factory, put it to Orlina to study anywhere abroad, choose his country and university, learn all that could be learned about glass artistry, specially glass sculpture, and they would foot the bill for all his expenses, starting immediately.
In some mysterious way aware even then of his own genius and its unlimited potential (he did not say this) he also had a hunch that modern intellectual property laws might just make him a worker for the modern Medici all his life; and so, Orlina made a “counter-proposal” – namely, allow him to study their glass factory so that he would understand better the medium of his choice, what his art could do with it, and what it could yield his art – which they readily did, fortunately for them, for Orlina, and for the whole world.
They all knew of course that glass art was as ancient as the making of glass itself going back to the earliest years of the Roman Empire. From Phoenicia to Lebanon, glassblowing in the hot fashion had become an art though trade in these art works was never brisk given the delicate and brittle characteristics of the material. There were many artifacts made of glass and crystal blown in most artistic ways but sculpting glass – what was that?
Ancient as the art of glass-making and the making of glass art was, nothing much had changed in the way it was done. There was really no sculpting of glass until…eureka! Ramon Orlina saw it, in 1976, at the aforementioned Republic Glass factory now known as the Republic Asahi glass Corporation.
What did he see? Of course nothing that other people had not seen before. Glass is recyclable. He saw how that was done. But before that process started, he saw the waste, the cullets, the residue in the factory furnaces…and his inner artistic eye saw them come to life and beauty, in many prismatic shapes of stories and meanings, and life itself.
This was a unique inscape into the heart of matter, matter as glass, and the unity of being. And the artist Orlina was sure of it. No more proof was needed but the agony and ecstasy of his determination and struggle and hard work, his perspiration and inspiration, his inner life of artistic creation now seeking to manifest in a unique medium which may or may not take a life time to be recognized. But there is no arguing with the artist in you: you either are one or you are not. There is no other-referral in that reality. Others catch up with you to recognize what you already saw.
According to the Gardener’s favorite book, A Course in Miracles, a miracle is nothing more than a change in perception: for instance, a shift from hate to love, from fear to faith, from doubt or despair to hope…a shift from waste to wealth, from residue to unique art, from cullets to everlasting forms.
It is when you change the way you look at things that miracles happen…the things you look at change. This was the Miracle of Ramon Orlina. Art, whether artists know it or not, is securely based in quantum physics.
Michelangelo was asked, “How did you carve the beautiful statue David out of a lump of stone?” Michelangelo replied, “David was already there in the rock, I simply carved away everything that was in the way.”
Ramon Orlina may not have known it then, more than thirty years ago. When he changed the way to look at glass waste or residue, the waste he looked at changed forever into the art works of glass sculpture you see in Green Belt and Santo Tomas, in Singapore and Madrid, in Czechoslovakia and Malaysia, in all countries of earth that are increasingly aware of this great unique sculptor and his works.
Quintessentially innovative, Orlina has been morphing glass into art the past few decades — carving figures out of hard solid blocks of glass using the cold method, cutting, grinding, and polishing his work with improvised tools and instruments – a feat unreplicated anywhere at all (Orlina cannot even replicate his works.) He was self-taught, with hardly any predecessor, mentor, or influence to emulate. Now he must find it hard to teach others how. The patient and the authentic can hang around the master like apprentices of old if they have the youthful zest and energy and they may then hope to imbibe the Creator Spirit that moves and transforms all matter, marble and glass waste and what have you to reflect the eternal line, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty; That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.”
But go, Gardener’s friends, go, if you can and see for yourself. See for yourself the play of light passing through solid blocks of crystals in natural green, amber, purple and full white clear. See what Orlina has done to an endlessly intriguing material, the way he has cautiously carved away every line, crease, contour or emptiness for their inevitable encounter with light and resultant luminosity. Take time for a multi-dimensional experience. Who knows – you may begin to suspect that this is what life is all about: light in darkness, wealth in waste, beauty in ugly residues, and everlasting life in what could easily have broken like glass.
FINIS
Charles Avila -The Gardener
The Gardener’s Tales