The Master Painter of the Pasig River
One of the things I want to do is to collect impressionist paintings. Since Van Gogh, Monet and company are way out of my league I settle for local, lesser known artists. One of only three painters in my very humble collection is Vicente Ido Larosa.
I only have more than five of his watercolors. My poverty prevented me from snapping up even one of his oils, even when he was offering it to me for a song (four gives pa). He was also mean with pastels. Of his watercolors, I only have three framed. One was “sold” to my mother for a princely sum of P10,000.00 and another I gave to my ninong-lawyer, Ricardo Valmonte, as token payment for his years of pro bono lawyering for me.
Mang Vic is only one of three visual artists whose work was made into a Philippine postage stamp. The others were National Artists Fernando Amorsolo and Cesar Legaspi. Larosa’s “Old Building & Tugboats Along the Pasig River (1997, 36” x 72”, oil) won the grand prize of the Piso Para sa Pasig Painting Contest. It was reproduced on an entire wall on the river facing Malacañang Palace and in thousands of special issue stamps. Woe is me, I only have a framed copy of the stamp—a gift from former First Lady Amelita Ramos.
Mang Vic was known as the Master Painter of the Pasig River. For most of his artistic life, he had no other muse but the stinking dead river. Through his art, contemporary Pinoys know that the Pasig was and is beautiful.
Larosa was a member of the Dimasalang group of artists. But he was unschooled, earning his artistic spurs painting movie billboards in Sampaloc. He was already quite old when he was given his first solo exhibit by his early collectors, Dr. Roger Mendiola and Mrs. Ramos.
He was a bachelor and had no close surviving kin. Orphaned early, raised by spinster aunts in Iloilo, he ventured out on his own with no peso on his frayed pocket. He did not marry; did not have kids. I suspect he was a homosexual but I am not sure.
Needless to say, he was poor, unlike his illustrious colleagues. He began to fetch good money for his paintings in his last years but I don’t know if he saved or he was able to collect from all his customers.
I introduced two budding artists to Mang Vic to be his students. Unfortunately, Jose Erwin Mallare was too temperamentally dark to see beauty around him and Edna Cahilog was too shy to pursue the partnership on her own.
Being far less talented, I only gave Mang Vic my pictures of the Pasig River. I hoped that he would turn some of them into paintings. I also promised to drive him to Cavite to paint some of Kawit’s shoreline but I was not good with my promise. Sayang.
In the last couple of years, Mang Vic vanished from sight. Last I knew, he was renting a room-studio somewhere in San Juan and still living on his own.
It was my sister Karen who told me about the news report announcing Mang Vic’s death. When I asked June Alvarez, he told me that Mang Vic died alone and lonely. Only her landlady was there to bring him food sometimes, which he could not eat until they turned stale and grew molds by his deathbed. When June went to pay his last respects, he saw Mang Vic had a pauper’s wake. Donations and late payments arrived and were given to a colleague who made the funeral arrangements but June thinks that not much was spent for Mang Vic on his last days on earth.
Mang Vic painted the Pasig River when it was a living waterway. He continued to paint it when the river died and turned black. I wish that the Pasig would not remain ignored and forgotten like her Master Painter.
