Damian Domingo strolls through Chinatown

Launched late last year bearing the Vibal Foundation imprint was The Life, Art, and Times of Damian Domingo by art scholar Luciano PR Santiago, whose middle initials after all are far from being a dead giveaway. Domingo is the first Filipino painter of note, residing at the turn of the 19th century in the general area of Tondo, which the reader can only imagine would spill over to Binondo, the painter having been a Chinese mestizo.

The semi-coffee table book, part of a series of art books by the same publisher, is well-researched, at least as far as a cursory reading is concerned, browsing through the little incidents and plates and overall worldview of the average indio and life in these islands before the time the national hero Rizal breathed the air near the then clear esteros and walked the winding cobblestone streets.

It’s true then, some of the vestiges of that former life can still be gleaned in the various nooks and crannies of present-day Manila, our noble and ever-loyal city, if one were observant and patient enough to take the time to be prudent and steer clear of the riotous kuligligs and exploding buses. This may well be a time beyond time, something the reader or researcher would encounter only in the rarest, dusted-off novels, rescued from the baul or obscure shelf, yet here surfacing and getting abreast of a lost century through this cultural scholarship and a good number of reproductions of paintings not necessarily Domingo’s himself, but also his contemporaries and influences and spiritual protégés.

During the launch at the Via Mare Oyster Bar at Greenbelt 3 the painter’s descendant Lisa Ongpin Periquet said one of the revelations during the course of the making of this book was that Domingo was Chinoy, which sort of left the family tree slightly ajar but still intact, a great big balete with its network of dizzying branches and the accompanying vines to boot to invite vertigo.

Aside from the religious paintings, quite obviously a hallmark of the times of friars and guilt and pre-RH bill, Domingo is also known for his tipos del pais, or island types verging on archetypes, drawings of people as his clear and unobstructed eye saw them, rendered by a steady hand on paper: the Bisaya, the Ilocano, the yndio natural dela provincia de Pangasinan, the yndia pescadora de Manila, the yndios labrador and banquero and cargador, the yndia mestiza de Pampanga, among others. They are a whole spectrum of common folk in their everyday wear, clearly a fashion of the age, which PR Santiago said was not far removed from their European counterparts, especially in the manner of the high-waist vestidas and  this observation mine alone  reticent panuelos.

The painter of the early 19th century was regularly commissioned, aside from doing large-scale portraits of political and religious personages to display in the lobbies and waiting rooms of government buildings, to also do miniature portraits of more or less the same subjects for them to take back to Spain in their wallets or lockets or prayerbooks, the images pressed gingerly between the pages.

Another interesting feature of this book is the exhaustive and extended family tree as drafted by one of the youngest of the painter’s descendants, Lisa Ongpin’s daughter Roberta, and another by Lisa’s younger brother Rafael or Apa. Here you find the somewhat discombobulating array of relatives and then some, who married whom, who in turn had more than one spouse, or had children with different mothers, who were extremely faithful and devoted at least on family tree, etcetera  the Puertos the Roas the Valdeconchas the Gabors the Neris the Macarios the Casases the De la Rosas the De la Encarnacions the Lamasins the Calupitans the Xeres-Burgoses the Lunas the Melgars the Nolascos the Cuarteros the Laffargues the Lomboys the Vistans the Obispos.

It is like a map you look at to cure you of any latent insomnia, until you are suddenly knocked back into wakefulness when someone in a bowler hat makes a cameo shouting “Damaso!” (Come to think of it, the large sculpture in the Manila Cathedral plaza harks back to the painter’s century.)

Levity aside, the book also uncovers a priceless document in the painter’s last will and testament, anticipating his death at the young age of 38 in 1834 of a chronic illness. The will includes instructions to pay an old debt to his elder sister, something which Santiago says speaks volumes of the man.

On the other hand, those of us left in the considerable time warp of the 21st century can only imagine what the painter of nearly 200 years ago would have seen as tipos del pais in a brief stroll through present-day Chinatown: the tuberos lined up squatted along the sidewalk with their steel cable panuksuks, the kutseros not necessarily the four horsemen waiting for clients, the attendants of the jewelry shops before their glass display counters, itinerants hawking fried siopao and alikba and dragon fruit amid the steam of cooking sweetmeats in the alley of Carvajal, the purple clad waitresses at the eatery by the volunteer fire station serving kamto with brown sticky rice, the sidewalk vendors selling blue seal cigarettes that for some reason they call “military.”

And when you open your eyes it as if the world is young again and the painter never left, he is still there walking on Ongpin street looking for a woman named Viernes Sabado before this advance reading copy falls apart in his painter’s hands.