Drawings as theater

AS A boy I read everything I could get my hands on, fish wrap included. But, truth to tell, I found home reading either unexciting (the daily Times or Chronicle) or strenuous (the weekly Free Press). Anyway, I read it all, as I did all else available, partly out of some nagging curiosity about what discoveries the printed word held for me, partly to increase my stock with my father.

“When you read, you get to know better and think better,” he would tell me.

He had the Free Press highest on his list of proper reading, a must in the thin family budget, but to him “a sacrifice well worth it.” He read all the politics in it and skipped the fiction and the entertainment. In his own private way, he was an intellectual snob, a defense mechanism, I suspect, for being—like me, his idolizing son—a dropout.

He would cross the street to Mang Dafreng’s barbershop to observe the debate that went on there all the time. He would drop in and soon, often enough, drop out, unable to stand the uninformed goings-on. He did not even let Mang Dafreng cut his hair, afraid of being detained helplessly and longer than he could suffer. He did not go to participate in the debate; he went for self-assurance.

But if anyone asked, and the crowd and the circumstances were suitable—if not in a barbershop, perhaps at a wake—he obliged with his views, mostly distillations from the Free Press. I had not myself begun to appreciate the Free Press until after high school.

It was the komiks I liked: stories told in drawings; characters speaking words spare enough to fit in balloons that actually enhanced, rather than obstructed, the illustration; and a narrator speaking even sparer words duly demoted to the bottom of the frame.

In perfect compensation, relatives doing nicely without the Free Press subscribed to the three premier komiks titles (Pilipino Komiks, Hiwaga Komiks, and Tagalog Klasiks) and sometimes bought yet other titles off the stands. The week after each issue, promptly and without fail, I visited them, lest I miss one single episode of the running novels I was following.

Komiks were, indeed, my literature and my art, and Francisco V. Coching was my favorite storyteller and artist. I’m not at all surprised that all but three of his 53 novels were made into movies. I’m also not surprised that many artists from his time enshrine him as mentor, inspirer, or idol.

I myself sometimes borrowed and brought home some old komiks numbers to trace selected frames from his stories. I not only wanted to compile the tracings so I could revisit Coching anytime I liked, but also hoped to learn to draw like him by retracing his strokes. As it happened, I could only be a good tracer.

Revisiting those tracings would be perfect at this time of Coching revivals, except that I have lost them in the course of a life of removals. So I made sure not to miss Monday’s launch at the Government Service Insurance System museum of a rich Coching exhibit, featuring originals and first prints and staying up until November 3.

Actually, I had been afforded a preview by the portraitist Lulu Coching-Rodriguez, doubtless her father’s daughter. Lulu sent an exhibit kit that included pictures of her father’s works in their original sizes. She very well knows the extents of my admiration for her father, whom I never met and never will—he has been gone all these 14 years.

Looking at Coching’s drawings again inspires the same joy I felt the first time I laid eyes on them. Nay, now that I look with more than the raw instincts of a boy, I feel in fact a sharper joy.

A much better tracer now, for one thing, I’m able to follow Coching’s confident and clean strokes more expectantly and meaningfully. I can see how, by his masterly choice of economy or richness of detail and by his play of light and shadow, he is able to command focus and create exciting perspectives and compositions. I can see more distinct beauty in all manner of anatomies, especially as they acquire grace once Coching makes them move.

Yes, his drawings move. They are theater. I don’t know how that’s possible in pen and ink, but, in Francisco V. Coching’s hands, it’s been made possible. That’s why he deserves posterity—posterity criminally denied him all this time.

Definitely not a Coching self-portrait, but an attempt at him by a distant and unknown student of his, the writer himself.

 

The foregoing is an updating—a reworking, really—of a piece the writer published in BusinessWorld on December 6, 2002. It is occasioned by a current exhibit of works by the novelist-illustrator Francisco V. Coching at the GSIS museum. The exhibit is intended to be taken to school and institutional museums across the country.