MY FIRST brush with John Michael Catigan was probably in a theatre production workshop I gave for the Dumangas National High School – Special Program for the Arts in 2011. As student of the Visual Arts department, he was involved in my workshop to help with props making, backdrop painting, and scenic visual design.
The second time I met Michael was in 2013 when his class made a documentary on West Visayan cultural icons of which I was the subject (as Ilonggo literary icon), and he was the videographer.
But our Facebook chats didn’t really start until after his high school graduation in 2015, when he asked me if I’d like to commission him for a painting made of “mud from our shared hometown of Dumangas.” He said the commission will help prepare for his college expenses in the city when he starts BS Civil Engineering at the University of San Agustin.
Fast forward to May 2018. Michael is having his first solo art exhibit at Et Nos Gallery. He is only 20 years old.
How did this happen?
Influenced and encouraged by his father Teodoro Jr., Michael had been painting since he was seven years old. In high school, he enrolled in the Special Program for the Arts and majored in Visual Arts under teacher Jessica Abiera. For his 2014 graduation thesis, he chose the Ermita Chapel Shrine of Dumangas as subject for his painting, and experimented on mud available in the area (mixed with linseed oil as adhesive) as painting medium in an attempt to “intertwine subject, history, and locality.”
By 2015, he was confident enough with the use of mud from various barangays of Dumangas and their properties (limestone for yellow ochre from Binaobao, reddish brown mud from Bantud, black from soil under the charcoal making process) to ask me if I’d like to commission a mud painting from him!
The artist Rock Drilon, a distinguished Dumangasanon in the Arts, is a major influence on Michael’s career trajectory via Drilon’s Art Cocoon Project in Dumangas. It started with an art workshop, followed by a painting contest, and ultimately, the creation of the Dumangas artists collective in 2016.
Winning both the individual, and group (as team leader), painting contests, Michael easily gained prominence and was elected as the first President of AVAC – the Araut Visual Artists Collective. (Araut is the old name of Dumangas).
Drilon’s presence in Dumangas has created a renaissance in the artistic life of the people, but more so in the visual arts. As Michael can attest, Drilon is, more than discovering talents, actively mentoring them, and giving their careers a helpful push.
In 2017, Michael won the Peter’s Prize for Visual Arts (Painting Based on Literature), and became the first Ambassador for the Visual Arts of The Peter Solis Nery Foundation, the sponsor of the contest. This award led to another award in 2018: the Gawad Agustino in Culture and the Arts from the University of San Agustin.
“Si Lirio Nangin Bulak”, Michael’s winning work at the Peter’s Prize contest, is a 3’ x 2’ mud painting that essays the transformation of Lirio as “she turns into a lily” surrounded by a multitude of butterflies and a lush detail of flowers (based on the modern classic magico-realist Hiligaynon story “Lirio”). This painting, now in the private collection of Mr. Leslie and Ms. Grace Blair, pre-dates and bears some compositional resemblance (a female figure and a surreal arrangement of repeated images) to at least three pieces on exhibit at the Et Nos Gallery.
Another series, called “Tone in Silence”, features a solitary bird and some repeated patterns of palms, leaves, flowers, huts, and grass.
The Peter’s Prize win (besting works in oil and acrylic among other media) is a significant career milestone for Michael as it opened the possibilities for his “lowly mud” as a painting medium. Of course, he will also pursue oil and acrylic, he says; but for now, he wants to concentrate and focus on mud, and help establish this as an art medium.
In sepia-like monochromatic harmony provided by various mud types from Dumangas, the artist Catigan explores silence, the interiority of self, and the almost elusive quality of serenity in his exhibit called Katilha. The art works feature familiar and ordinary rural images in dreamlike compositions that rely mostly on painstakingly observed details and surreal repetitions.
Katilha (Serenity), which will run at Et Nos Gallery (located at Angelicum School in Tabuc Suba, Jaro) from May 9 to 30, 2018, is Michael’s first solo exhibit featuring 14 mud paintings, curated by no less than Rock Drilon. (500tinaga@gmail.com/PN)
