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By Nini P. Yarte
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Photo by
KJ Rosales |
Locavore. The word comes close to defining this
woman’s appetite. Picked by Time Magazine as seventh on its list
of 10 best buzzwords last year, it means a “person who tries to
eat only foods that are harvested locally.”
Close, but not quite. “I don’t eat frozen
foods. We are like country bumpkins of old who don’t even own
refrigerator,” Marlene Aguilar says in one corner of a huge
restaurant, exquisitely scented, the ultimate in Asian craftsmanship
everywhere you look.
“Good food is served here,” you’ve been
told, but not by Marlene though who happens to own the restaurant.
It’s peculiar that the owner herself does not want the place
publicized, although she says it pays for itself. You look around
and wonder. Where are the diners?
But this is not about the restaurant business.
Marlene Aguilar is not advocating any diet fad of a sort. The woman
is voracious, seriously. But not for stuff that goes down your
throat. She can never have enough art in her life. “I think people
in the art world are lucky because they can feed their soul,” she
says.
She has always sought that kind of sustenance,
which explains her coming home after living in the United States for
11 years, leaving behind a successful career in hotel and management
to make a new start in her own country. “I do not want to spend my
life worrying about bank accounts and South Sea pearls,” she says
defiantly. “I want my life to matter.”
She knows what to do, and where she’s at in
the ten years that she’s been back is exactly how she had planned
it—an independent publisher of quality art books that she could
show to the world.
Her conviction: “You have to compete in
quality with the world. Globalization is a reality we have to deal
with. We are so good in so many things. If we get stuck here, what
will happen to us? If we can sell our music to the world, we
can sell our visual arts to the world. So I develop my own group of
artists to promote their works and the Philippines abroad. Our
artists are very good; they just don’t know they’re that good.
But instead of doing exhibits to promote them, which is passé, I do
books. That is the wave of the future.”
In 1997, using her own savings, she produced her
first coffee table book featuring the underwater art of Rafael Cusi,
The Philippine Coral Reefs in Watercolor. The book won the European
Art for Environment Award. On Saturday, April 5, she will launch her
latest book, Philippines, featuring over 230 paintings of Nik
Masangcay. This early, the book has been nominated for the 2008 Hong
Kong Print Award.
“When I told Nik a year and a half ago when I
met him that I’d put his works in a book, he was stunned. He was
painting on small pieces of paper. That was his discipline. I told
him he has the talent, I like his art and I like his attitude,”
Marlene relates.
She interjects that artists are easily spoiled
by small awards. “They no longer recognize people,” is how she
puts it. On the other hand, the modesty of her protégé drove her
to tears at some point in their working relationship.
Despite Marlene’s relentless prodding,
Masangcay couldn’t see himself becoming anything but a miniature
artist. “Nik had no faith in himself when we started on the book
project. But when he saw the finished product, he said he was ready
to die. You will never see a book about the Philippines rendered
this way. This is Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao in watercolor,
beautifully photographed,” she says, proudly flipping through the
expensive pages.
Marlene counts her publishing success in ways
that will astound people in the business. She has done 10 titles and
will do 20 more in the next five years. She calculates probably
making half a million dollars from the books, but she may still end
up broke. Philippines will be launched the following Saturday at The
Manor Hotel in Baguio with a guarantee of 3,000 copies sold, which
translates to around P6 million. Her organizer in Italy has
guaranteed 10,000 copies.
“I put them back into the projects,”
she explains, and then she laughs. “I was successful in the hotel
business, but I was not happy doing it. I just wanted to prove to
myself that I could make it in that world. Because I could prove
that I can make money in hotel and restaurant management, I wanted
the more difficult task of making money and feeding my soul at the
same time.”
And this, to her, is the funny part. “The
money does not belong to me and I don’t belong to money,” she
says, laughing harder.
Seriously, she confides about being fortunate in
rallying supporters towards her cause. “There are over the years
people who have grown in number to support my because they believe
that I can do something for the Philippines.”
Marlene is now in the second phase of her plan,
which is to concentrate on Philippine history. She lets on that she
has been criticized for talking about things that happened 400 years
ago. “But that’s exactly the problem—we don’t know
what happened 400 years ago. I question the past, I question our
history,” she declares. She believes she could put to right what
she perceives to be wrong through art.
She expounds on the first phase, her mission to
wrench the art community from its own colonial mentality. “For the
past 10 years, I have published books in defense of the Asian way,
which is watercolor. We are masters in watercolor, we are at home
with ink. We could never approximate Europe’s mastery of oil.
It’s their thing. At this point, I believe we are tipping the
balance towards the Asian way.”
To inaugurate the second phase is a coffee table
book on Muslim Mindanao. “It is going to be more magnificent than
Philippines. I have the support of Bangsa Moro. I have approached a
US army general. I saw the powers that be here. I told them the
position of the book against the US engagement here. We had a big
argument. They will have their say in the book, the Muslims will
have their say, and I will have my say.”
Marlene knows she is in danger, but there is no
going back. This is what she lives for. Love of country and its art
fuels her.
When she declares, “The reason that I have
spent 10 years of my life promoting Philippine art and culture is I
believe art and culture is the soul of the nation,” you listen.
When she tells you, “All the artists I’ve supported in the past
10 years have made it; I see what can become of them and the country
they paint so well. To the best of my knowledge, I have not been
wrong,” you pay attention. And when she looks straight into your
eyes and says, “I give my energy to the unknown young artists
because they are the future of the Philippines. I believe that as
the new generation grows, there will be a Philippine renaissance and
we will again be one of the top nations in Asia. Always, through
art,” you believe. Because Marlene Aguilar never has to eat her
words.
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