IN BETWEEN Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera’s iconic Sabel and Larawan series, the National Artist had a phase when he focused on drawing punks as a form of diversion from his signature paintings in the early 1980s.
The artist told BusinessWorld that he was drawn to London’s punk subculture — their dyed hair, cool haircuts, and their unconventional fashion — “because they were colorful.”
“That was the era when they felt like they belong to a tribe — you’d have the skinheads, the rockers, the London punk, kanya kanya (different sorts). I think the punks are more approachable. The skinheads are racialists and violent,” he said, laughing, at the sidelines of the opening of his exhibition called London Punk Drawings 1981-1984 on Nov. 6.
BenCab’s 39 punk portraits will be on view until Feb. 8 at the Conrad Manila’s Gallery C.
DRAWING FROM LIFE
The artist, who was dressed in a punkish all-black outfit which include a skull T-shirt for his exhibit opening, said he met the punks in London where he lived for 13 years.
“The punks lived in squats. They’d go and sign their UB40, [an unemployment benefit form card] where they get a weekly allowance and they used the money to buy paraphernalia and dyes. I found it interesting. I asked them to pose for me and I paid them £2 per hour. They agreed because they were hard up, too. They brought their own casettes to listen to their punk music [while I drew them].”
During the years that he was in London to start his family, he did many on-the-spot portraits of the punks.
He explained that back in the 1980s, minimalism and abstract painting were “uso” (trendy), “but there was a revival for figuration. Me, I love to draw from life. In a way, it’s good to revive that because you can never remove the skill from drawing from live, the hand-to-eye coordination.”
He added that he has always loved drawing. Back in London he was inspired by other London-based artists like David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, and Lucien Freud when it came to drawing.
Drawing from life is more challenging than painting from imagination, said the artist.
“[When you do it] from memories, you can invent, you dream, but from live, you draw the subject in front but it’s not really copying photographically, because the model usually moves, you capture the personality of the model.”
RETROSPECTIVE?
The 39 portraits in the exhibition are all from BenCab’s own collection. In his exhibition are portraits of men and women in blue or hot pink hair or mohawks, decked out in studded belts, boots, and bracelets. Some women were nude while some were braless.
“I was invited to exhibit any work here [in Conrad]. I realized that I have some drawings. I went to my studio to check and I have found I have a stock of drawings, of punk drawings. I thought ‘marami pa pala ito ah (I still had many of them), good enough for a show.’ So I proposed to them and [waited if] they would agree to show an early work. They liked it. Timely, with the Bohemian Rhapsody [referring to the Queen movie currently in theaters].”
So, after nearly 40 years, BenCab is resurrecting his collection of punk drawings. He said: “Somehow it’s good to have a retrospective. Uso na ’yun no? (Its trendy now) It’s also to show the era of that period.”
The 76-year-old National Artist said of his more than three-decade-career: “work every day.”
“Number one is to be healthy and continue your creative process. Have discipline, work every day. Sometimes I do bonsai and assemblage of things. You get a lot of pressure, lalo na (especially) when a lot of people are demanding some works from you. But you have to be happy first. I take my time, that’s why there are few works [of mine] in the current market, except in auctions which I don’t own, they are cashing in [money],” he said.
NOT THE FIRST TIME
But this isn’t the first time that the artist is doing a punk-themed exhibition. By the end of 1981, he had amassed such a large collection of punk portraits that he was able to put up a show called Punks at the Tricycle Theater Gallery in London. The following year, during one of his periodic homecomings from London to Manila, he also held a punk-themed exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Little Gallery. He arrived at that show decked out in a studded leather vest, a black shirt, and a studded bracelet. But the show wasn’t a success. In the words of writer Eric S. Caruncho who wrote an essay that accompanies the current exhibition: “Perhaps the art crowd didn’t know what to make of it at the time,” and the local art aficionados, he said, had a hard time reconciling BenCab’s Larawan series with European punks.
The artist said of the experience: “They were not as saleable as now. That time maybe they found it very different from what I used to do.”
But now that the punk culture has gained more local resonance and popularity, his current exhibition at Conrad might tell a different story. — Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
