It is very difficult to put 99 years on paper. For one, you don’t get to meet a 99-year-old man everyday. Also, not every 99-year old you meet happens to be an artist.

The 99-year-old man I met at 856 G Gallery last March happened to be an artist, and not just any artist—he is the Father of Philippine Printmaking, Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. Along with my students who came with me then, I knew, therefore, that the opportunity of being with him and learning from him might not present itself again. Encountering a person who is almost a century old is very humbling. It is like opening the book of his personal experience; going through the pages, you grow all the wiser.

Manuel Rodriguez had first discovered his talent in the arts one particular afternoon in his childhood in Cebu. Playing in a churchyard, he picked up a piece of limestone and began to draw on the church wall. He drew a face that seemed to return a smile at him. Thinking that it was a simple gift of chance, he drew another face, and then another… and the rest was etched in history.

In September of 1935, in a move that many had told him to be a jump into uncertainty, Rodriguez left Cebu on a steamboat for Manila. On his meager savings, he was able to enroll himself at the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Fine Arts.

College life was tough, he recalled, but his heart was just as tough—enough to withstand the difficulties that came his way. From where he stayed, he often walked to the campus. He would skip lunch so he could buy art materials. Maintaining a scholarship, he got excellent grades and, in 1939, graduated at the top of his class. He was one of the 15 (out of their original batch of 50) who graduated that year.

The year 1939 also saw Rodriguez’s introduction to the world of printmaking, when Hans Adolf Heimann invited him to his serigraphy class in UP. Initially a painter, Rodriguez continually experimented with materials and processes since then and, in the 1950s, finally focused on printmaking.

For a time, Rodriguez was criticized for persisting in an art form that was already considered “dead” by others. But especially after learning more from a scholarship on printmaking in New York in the 1960s, he shared what he knew with younger artists back in the Philippines (particularly at the Phil. Women’s University and the Contemporary Arts Gallery in Manila), conducting workshops among them, improvising machines, and developing techniques, thus reviving the interest in and pioneering the phenomenal growth of printmaking in the country. In 1968, he founded the Philippine Association of Printmakers. His prints were the first ones done by a Filipino to be part of international biennial exhibitions abroad. He eventually received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field and to the national consciousness, and became recognized as the “Father of Philippine Printmaking.”

Indeed, keeping an art form alive is not just a matter of opening art galleries and filling them with patrons. In my stint as an art instructor, I have realized that it also means grabbing hold of the generations to come, keeping them involved and in full interaction with the—excuse me for the words but please consider it a privilege to be labeled as such—older and more experienced generation. For as much as it seems straitlaced to do just that, not to do so would already be bordering moronic.

That evening of March 1, Rodriguez talked to my students with such passion for the future, he sounded like one who was planning to live forever. One challenge that he gave their generation was this: “You’re building on 99 years of history. When you’re at this age, you cannot satisfy yourself with what is not doubly great.”

It is a challenge that goes beyond the constant improvement of one’s talents, which should actually come as a sort of default setting for an artist. Unfortunately, many of the current generation of artists and students lack both mental and physical toughness. Compounding that further, we seem today to be a people living without any sense of urgency.

Students, for instance, have absented themselves from my classes by reason of a few inches of floodwater in their way. They could probably not imagine doing what Manuel Rodriguez had done in his college days: walking in waist-deep floodwater just so he could get to school.

Moreover, the technology we have in our hands provides us with a multitude of conveniences that may not be actually working for us. I’ve read my share of student “essays” copied straight from Wikipedia, for example. I’ve had my share of talented students who relied too much on their perceived personal capabilities; they showed up only on the first and last days of their classes with me. At such a young age, many have chosen to rest on their accomplishments and so are putting little effort in improving themselves, much less in looking forward.

But Manuel Rodriguez is one man who does not rest on his laurels. Even at 99, he sounds like he is expecting to accomplish so much more with his art and with his life. In that hour-and-a-half interview at the gallery, he said, “How would one explore the unexplored colors of the universe? More difficult would be capturing them all and presenting them again on canvas.” How I wish I could pry into his inner world and figure that out, too.

As a printmaker, an artist creates an image that is then transferred onto paper. In what may seem like a cross between traditional art and modern-day mass production, the printmaker may limit the number of copies he produces of each masterpiece and thereby further its value. Rodriguez’s exhibit at the 856 G Gallery on A.S. Fortuna starting last February was a feast for the eyes: a collection of his prints and paintings, the price tags for which could only leave me jolted in silence.

Nonetheless, my own eyes were drawn to the horses in his prints—how gracefully their lines came together, creating dynamic yet calming movements. They were in black and white, the gradations filling the spaces between the two values. The series, entitled “Polo,” was created in 1978 in New York. As in all his other works in the gallery, Rodriguez has shown his lifelong romance with texture, in the same way that other artists might pursue lines, shapes, and colors instead. For him, however, it is texture that has “the feel of life.”

A person can stand before the prints and, with the luxury of time, separate one line from another, mulling over the process of its creation, considering how the minuscule variations in line thickness and form can present themselves in a plethora of possibilities. There is, after all, in us, an innate and almost primeval need to stand before a thing of beauty and dissect its reason for being. Going through the works of art in this exhibit, however, my mind could not help but drift back to the one who had made them with such mastery and whom they, in their varied ways, reflect.

An African proverb goes like this: “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” And that is why stories from the wizened elderly are always interesting. But while some 80-year-olds start to write the end of their books, Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. at 99 is still eyeing chapters that are yet to come.

With his kind of thinking, it is no wonder that the man remains in full jurisdiction of his inner world, his works of art, and his life as a whole. Mind you, he was fully capable of scaling a mean set of stairs when we met. Certainly, Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. is one library whose books I would never wish to put down.

• The paintings and prints of Manuel Rodriguez, Sr. are with 856 G Gallery in Business Walls, A.S. Fortuna St., Banilad, Mandaue City, until the month of July 2011. For further inquiries, call 344.3039 or email info@856ggallery.com.
• by Patricia Kyle Mendoza