He Almost Chopped Up Guyito and Served Him a la Carte
By Elvira Mata Inquirer News Service
Published on page Q4 of the October 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
STEVESANTOS had big plans for Guyito. “There are so many things you could do with a project like this,” the artist says. “I thought of showing him with mud from his hoofs up to his knees. Yun lang. Di ba ang kalabaw lagi namang nakababad sa putik? (Aren’t carabaos always immersed in mud?) But later, I thought it wouldn’t be appropriate. Perhaps if I were an experimental artist like (Roberto) Chabet,” he says. Whew! Thank God, Stevesantos is a magic realist painter. Next idea, please.
“Then I thought of chopping him up and presenting him in pieces on a table—the head, the tail, the shank—like what you would expect to see in a market. But the instructions were to show Guyito as a whole and not in parts,” he continues. Correction: In the ’70s, Stevesantos painted in the style of magic realism. Since then, he’s developed an affinity for the abstract. “Or I could exhibit him upside down. I could do many things,” he says.
Definitely, abstract carabao
In the end, Stevesantos painted Guyito red, gave him a saddle with a dancing red sun right smack in the middle of the back and a line art rendition of nipa huts and rice fields on the sides. It looks like Guyito, symbol of the Filipino everyman, is on his way to a town fiesta, not to a mud bath, the butcher or a taxidermist. “Kasi pula, sa unang tingin, mukha siyang rebelde (With red, he looks like a rebel at first glance),” Steve muses. “Ngayong tapos na, he reminds me of the papier mache horses they make in Laguna.”
Guyito, he observes, is a familiar figure on Inquirer’s the front page. “He’s everywhere,” he says. “Sometimes he’s on top or at the bottom of the page. But he’s always funny. I think that’s why he became an icon.” Steve, the eldest son of Malang, was exposed to art at a very young age. It was not surprising that he followed in his father’s footsteps, painting in a style similar to his, and even working a number of years as art director for glossies and a business magazine in Hong Kong.
In the beginning, I was painting in the semi-abstract style just like my father,” Steve says. “Then I discovered Andrew Wyeth.” He started doing simple but detailed works in the style of America’s famous proponent of magic realism with watercolor as his medium.
Realistic monochromes
Steve became famous for his signature images—a pail left in the open, clothes hanging out to dry, shanties on the roadside. He later applied this technique to landscapes, sometimes using acrylic. Then he adapted a less detailed but still realist style, with a predisposition for monochromatic hues. This served to highlight his skills in drawing and composition. In the ’80s, he made the big and inevitable leap to abstraction. Landscapes still served as his subject, but his works ran along three directions: The first was spare and chromatic, the second was hyper realistic in detail (you’d need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate it) and the third was street scenes viewed at eye level or from an angle.
Steve admits to being a computer nerd, and is up to date with the latest graphic arts software from Adobe Illustrator to InDesign. He has designed coffee table books like “Art Philippines” and “Ang Kiukok,” annual reports, brochures and logos. He is a member of eArt Philippines, a group of 16 digital artists who, a few years ago, worked together on a 25-foot “Mallarium,” a huge mall-inspired rendition of Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium.”
In January, he held his 16th one-man show titled “Landscapes” at SM Megamall, featuring 25 pieces rendered in Japanese ink and watercolor. Inquirer art critic Constantino Tejero was there and chronicled the changes in Steve’s style: “Formerly a proponent of magical realism a la Wyeth, the artist still creates images characterized by sharp-focus details but now in panoramic views instead of close-ups. His visions of earth and sky alternate between serenity and menace: still trees, neat grassland, black clouds, a tornado brewing, a thunderstorm breaking in the sky. By rendering these sweeping vistas in monochrome, stevesantos has created imagery that still looks realist, maybe romantic in tone, but not sentimentalized.”
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