The warm glow of dawn begins to cast her spell over the darkened land. The sky of black turns slowly to misty blue, then pink, then peach, each blending one into the other, until there is no way to tell where one ends and the other begins. The silence of the night is lost to the chirping of the birds, the soft splash of the fish on the crystal lake, the hearty laughter of a child. Life is now in full bloom.
Not quite differently, the artist's brush begins to impart color to the lifeless canvas. Pale whiteness gives way to patches of green, violet, peach, and gold, then to shapes, then to subjects. From the strokes of wet paint emerges life, or the likeness of it, in forms that stir the senses. Children frolicking - the very icons of innocence. Sunlight streaming through the woods. Pungent smelling grass, still cool and damp beneath bare feet. Many a babe in the warmth of a mother's embrace.
Artist Jun Martinez has been creating such summer scenes in oil, acrylic, and watercolor for most of his two-decade painting career. His exhibits have revolved around this theme, with children as the main characters in his artworks. The artist's passion for the subject becomes understandable as one gathers that in the small barrio that was once his home, he savored the outdoor pleasures of his childhood summers.
Jun Martinez was born on November 1, 1959, to Perfecto Martinez, after whom he was named, and Necitas Adolfo in Aranda, Hinigaran, Negros Occidental. He was the youngest in a brood of three girls and two boys. The family lived a simple and quiet farm life, with his father growing rice and sugar cane, and his mother lovingly raising the children.
Before Jun even reached school age, he showed a strong inclination to drawing. It was like an inborn thing. With astonishing ease, he would make a circle into a balloon or a make a face out of it. He would transform lines and shapes into objects, and his pen strokes seemed to flow endlessly. Soon enough he was able to copy characters from rented comic books. He worked with patterns so intricately and had such imagination.
Thin and sickly as a boy, Jun was spared the task of tending carabaos in the farm. This afforded him more chance to explore his drawing and discover what he really wanted: to make art his life. He would spend hours in the shade of spreading trees doing sketches of the ripe rice fields and the mountain in the horizon, and depicting in so many ways the simplicity of life in the small barrio.
School was a four-kilometer daily walk from home, and back, on a meandering dirt road. The path could be longer if Jun and his sister Juliet would stop to chase dragonflies across bamboo fences. The routine of school days was shaped by myriad deficiencies. Lacking electric lights, homework must be done before evening fell. With no plumbing in the house, children were sent for their daily bath to the poso., which also provided them drinking water. Everybody went early to bed and rose while the dew was still on the grass. If there was time before breakfast, Jun and his brother Noel would go out and catch spiders hiding beneath fallen leaves. They kept these tiny fighters inside matchboxes and unleashed them for after-school bouts.
Jun loved to read just as he loved his mother reading to him stories. Having reached seventh grade, she was an effective storyteller. She made his imagination grow and go places with such tales as "The Man Who Stole the Moon," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Romeo and Juliet." She taught him to have a good heart, too.
In school, Jun became known consistently as ‘the artist’ in his class, proving further his talent in lettering and design. He was bright by anybody’s measure, managing to stay in the top ten and graduating valedictorian from grade school. He was quite shy and unassertive, though, probably because he spent more time with his pencil and paper than with other children. He feared the thought of his teachers visiting him at home, and was nowhere to be found when times like that became inevitable.
Throughout his first eighteen summers, Jun stayed close to home, but his mind always took off to the big city and to his big dream of making it in the art scene. He began painting at age fourteen, using enamel paint on lawanit. As he could not afford to go to art school, the ambitious and gifted young man ventured for Manila in 1978 and landed a job as layout artist and illustrator of children's textbooks. The strong desire to paint brought him back home three years later, where he experimented on varied styles while seeking his own place among Bacolod’s prolific breed of artists. Not quite happy about the slow progress he was making, he returned to Manila and continued to hone his art, painting after work until late nights. On his own, he studied the lives and works of great painters. In the mid-80s, his art explored a combined surrealist/expressionist technique. One such piece, "Noonbreak in a Convex Mirror," won for him an award in the 1987 Metrobank Painting Competition. A voracious reader of art books, he was later drawn to the works of the French and American impressionists, notably Manet and Sargeant, and Filipino master Juan Luna. Today, while he is not given to saying much about his works, they well speak of bits of varied technical mastery which through the years the artist has imbibed in creating his own.
As Jun immersed himself more deeply into his art, he came to terms with the fact that making art was easier than making a name and money out of it. He needed connections, thus he began to regularly attend sketching sessions of the Wednesday Group – now the Tuesday Group where he is a core member – organized by the late Filipino master Jose Joya. It was only after fifteen years of work as illustrator at the publishing house did he pluck up the courage to go into full-time painting. He felt blessed as his works steadily found their way into the mainstream of the Philippine art scene.
As art critics and enthusiasts have put it, Jun Martinez’s paintings have a feeling of reaching back in time. We see images and scenes borrowed from some past summer we find ourselves recalling. The works succeed in setting the tone for daydreaming, in teasing the mind into journeys that begin with dried paint and may lead just anywhere.
Jun Martinez sees his past, present, and future in the brushstrokes and colors on his canvas. He continues to live his childhood summers in his works. He has two children of his own to share those sunlit moments with, and hopes to do so for the rest of his time.
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