The Artist Behind The Philippine Presidential Seal
With the current hullabaloo on social media about the Presidential daughter of Philippine republic Isabel Duterte on using the Malacanang Palace as her set location of her pre-debut photoshoot, escalated when a viral photo of her striking a pose beside the Seal of The President, I find it relevant to post about the designer of this seal.
Most Millenials these days do not know anything about Galo Ocampo. But the dead artist is “digitally” relived and quite relevant today as his piece of design is spread all over Facebook- a permanent legacy of a “not-frequently-talked-about”artist who is one of the pioneers of Philippine Modern Art.
The post below is a published article for a Kapampangan magazine. If you find it too regionalistic, it’s because it’s for the Kapampangan community.
The article was published in 2013.
Just recently, I was given an invitation to attend an exhibition of the works of the late Philippine Modernist Artist Galo Ocampo through the office of the College of Fine Arts in UST where I am a faculty member under the advertising department. Entitled Mysteries and Color: Galo Ocampo, the exhibit is a tribute to the artist’s 100 years birth centenary that was born on October 16, 1913. To take note of the contribution of Galo Ocampo, he was actually one of the “Triumvirate” comprised of its renowned modernist artists, National Artist Victorio Edades and National Artist Carlos “Botong” Francisco who opposed the orthodoxy of academic art in the 1930’s pre-war period- paving the way for the introduction of modern art in the Philippine art scene. But what is quite important with Galo Ocampo is that, he was a Kapampangan and he was born in Sta.Rita, Pampanga.
I was in my college years attending my Philippine Art History class when I learned the works of Galo Ocampo. I was even surprised to discover that my middle name Ocampo, rooted from Santa Rita, Pampanga is related to his — a distant relative if I may say. During that time, I wasn’t really fascinated with the works of Ocampo particularly his paintings. I am into classical art and admired the works of classical Filipino painters such as Felix Resureccion Hidalgo, Juan Luna and Fernando Amorsolo. I am into “impressionesque” atmosphere and not really into the issues on paintings surrounded with political and religious iconography — things that are very prevalent in the works of Ocampo.
In my stay here in the region, I realized that some of the writers depiction on art and the artist sometimes fail to write accurately the provenance (the roots or source of a certain artwork of artists), which can mislead the audience on the real context of the art. I remember my Art History Professor, Jak Pilar got disappointed on the wrong captioning of a certain colonial painting inside one of the popular museums in Manila. He said that changing the title, medium, dates and provenance of a certain art historical piece is more like sabotaging the history that is embedded as a context, which formed the artwork. Prof. Pilar is one of the pillars of Philippine Art who knows a great deal on the evolution of Philippine Art in the country. From him I learned how art exists within a context and started to ignite my interest of the works of Ocampo. Ocampo’s art is filled with a conflicts powerful context of the sacred and the politically profane.
Galo Ocampo finished his Fine Arts education at the UP School of Fine Arts, which he undertook between 1929 to 1934 and later on went abroad for further education. He was the first Filipino who studied heraldry (Wikipedia defines this as is the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms.) as a special course in Washington D.C. and became a member of the International Institute of Genealogy and Heraldry in Madrid, Spain and, some years later, studied the art of liturgy in Rome, Italy. Two of the monumental works of Ocampo are the stained glass windows in the Sto. Domingo Church and Manila Cathedral — all with Marian theme, commissioned by the Archbishop of Manila in the 1960’s where the techniques he applied on them was learned through his education in Rome. The one responsible on his education in Rome was another famous Kapampangan Archbishop — Rufino Cardinal Santos. Ocampo became a faculty of the UST College of Fine Arts headed by Victorio Edades and also headed the now Far Eastern University’s Department of Fine Arts.
The most controversial of his works was the “The Brown Madonna (Oil on Canvas.1938)” which was a deviation of the conventional subjects in a Madonna and Child painting which are typically portrayed as white or Caucasians. I will focus my article on this since it’s more comprehensible. It is interesting to note that Ocampo was ahead of his time in terms of his consciousness in the whitewashing of specific religious icons in the Western iconography. I was lucky enough to see the actual painting after its restoration. Standing in front of the artwork, I was in awe. I am neither into the subject nor the controversy it gave more than 80 years ago. I was into the beauty of the forms and figures as well the ideas of doing it — enough to say that Ocampo was too way ahead of his time when he painted it.
Careful analysis of the formal arrangement of the elements of the painting shows the asymmetrical balance in composition where the subjects are superimposed on the right side of the pictorial field. There’s a receding line on the background that delineates the mountain and the clouds, leading the eye towards the head of the woman figure. If you look closely on the bottom part, the subjects are “encapsulated” with leaves on the right and lily’s on the left. Lily in this case is from a Greek symbolism that has something to do with birth and motherhood. Filipino elements are juxtaposed against the figures as bamboo trees and bahay kubo dominated and served as the background. The figures are represented with halos, connoting their divine existence as mere deified symbols that represent the same iconographic context as their conventional Caucasian counterpart.
There is still so much to do and to write about Kapampangan artists who made monumental contribution in the Philippine art. We have Vicente Manansala, Benedicto Cabrera, Willy Layug and Toym Imao to name a few who were and are trail blazers that will surely make the Kapampangans integral part of Philippine Art History’s timeline. We only have to be aware of them by writing accurate history about them.
