Contemporary Philippine Art from Regions

• In everyday language, the terms “modern” and “contemporary” are often used interchangeably.
• In the context of art, however, “modern art” dates from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries and refers to work that was entirely different from that which preceded it.
• Modernism began as a trend of thought that emphasized the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology, and practical experimentation.
• Modernism was initially an ideological reaction to the dehumanizing effects of late-nineteenth-century industrialization.
• Other world events further inspired the movement, including World War I (1914 – 1918) and World War II (1939 – 1945); huge improvements in industry and technology as compared to the nineteenth century; the rise in the power and influence of international corporations; increasing interconnectedness across the globe in the form of cultural exchanges, transportation, and communication; the spread of popular culture from Europe and North America elsewhere; and the “Westernization” of many formerly traditional societies.
• Chesterton observed that there was a great difference between an eager man who wanted to read a book and a tired man who wanted a book to read.
• Listening to music involves hearing a succession of sounds, at times harmonious, at times discordant, which may produce a certain mood, somber or gay.
• Understanding a picture involves understanding the pattern of rhythmic movement created by an artist who begins his picture by organizing his canvas into color areas with no visible representational content.
• Understanding literature involves understanding the pattern of rhythmic movement created by a writer who uses words, combines them into phrases, phrases into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs or verses; and by repetition, variation, and movement toward a climax creates a pattern which not only conveys the content but, because of its inherent capacity to arouse emotional response, vivifies the content, gives it a dynamic quality that is not inherent in the mere meaning of the words and the sentences.
• Understanding music involves hearing a melody, perhaps just a few bars, to hear it again in another key and again in its original form; or if you have noticed a second melody with which the first interweaves, and if you have discovered that the quality of each varies according to the instrument on which it is played.
• Reading a book, listening to music, or seeing a picture requires concentrated activity of both the emotions and the intelligence.
• Modern art reflects a tendency toward abstract and nonrepresentational depictions of the world.
• Many styles of art developed during the modern period, including impressionism, fauvism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, pop art, op art, art nouveau, and art deco.
• Line suggests movement in some direction: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or curved, each of which produces a certain emotional reaction.
• The character of line is dependent upon the implement with which it is made (brush, burin, chalk, silver-point) and the personality and the skill of the artist.
• Light may be the result of natural illumination, as in architecture and sculpture, where projections catch the light and depressions hold shadows, which shift according to the time of day and the weather.
• The painter or the lithographer may reproduce natural or artificial lighting, and at the same time use it as a point of emphasis or in relation to other light areas as a means of securing movement through his picture.
• Elements in design provide the artist with means for creating forms with coherence, unity with variety, balance, and emphasis.
• Each element has inherent character with its own potentialities and limitations, which the artist chooses according to the nature of the project in hand, his own individuality, and the controlling forces of his environment.
• Line direction and relationships are used by the artist for effect.
• Line is an elastic term that may be an edge, a meeting of areas, a contour, or suggest mass or calligraphy.
• Values, like lines, produce an emotional effect.
• Light and dark, known as values or by the Italian word chiaroscuro (light-dark), range from white to black, with an infinite number of gradations between.
• Artificial illumination or controlled lighting is an element of the highest importance to the sculptor and the photographer as an organizing element.
• The term “contemporary art” is generally regarded as referring to work made between 1970 and the present.
• There are putative works of art, including some later twentieth-century art, whose structure is so remote from traditional instances of "configurational unity", that the claim that their form is their essential feature, qua artwork, becomes drastically attenuated.
• The formal structure of a work of art may be valued for its controlling, its focusing, of the work's unique expressive qualities -- for which we ultimately treasure it.
• Representation theorists and expression theorists do, of course, allow that art can be innovative -- reworking nature's materials in a "new" nature, or drastically modifying life experiences in the fashioning of expressive art.
• Notoriously, there can be no once-and-for-all pinning down of necessary and sufficient conditions for the formally satisfying or the aesthetically "right".
• The temporal arts, although presenting motifs, brief melodies, rhythms, phrases of poetry which constantly pass into silence, effect a partial transcendence of that evanescence in time, precisely on account of their formal structuring where early notes (or images) are retained, remain active, ingredient in the total experience, recalled even as a movement (or poem) comes to its close.
• Some critics have argued that the theory has most plausibility with regard to complex works of art, but has little power to illuminate in the case of simple ones, where the concepts of synthesizing, interconnecting, mutual modifying gain no hold.
• In other cases, the expressive and the formal properties are co-equally important.
• The formalist or organic unity theory makes the artist’s innovative role more central: the unities of art are nowhere paralleled in nature.
• Damian Domingo, the first Filipino to paint his face, was the first self-portrait in the Philippines and is considered the "Father of Filipino Painting".
• From one colonizer to another, the Americans came to the Philippines after more than three centuries of Spanish rule and set out to conquer the Filipinos through education and governance.
• During the Spanish era, art was used as a tool to propagate the Catholic faith through beautiful images.
• Miguel Zaragosa's two pointillist works marked the beginning of modernism in the Philippines.
• Ethnic art was integral to life and was used for ritual purposes or for everyday use.
• Clive Bell's account of "significant form" helped to make possible the shift in sensibility needed for acceptance of post-impressionist painting.
• A theory with several fundamental concepts may better understand the phenomena in their complexity and illuminate the inner dynamics of creation.