The Fisherman

One can feel the Cebuano heat emanating from Martino Abellana’s “The Fisherman”. The eponymous subject, exposed to the sun, squints under his buri hat, though the rest of his body has tanned into a crisp brown. In the large expanse of turquoise sea, he is marooned on a bare-bones bangka, no bigger than the outrigger of the larger boat in the background. As foreboding gray clouds engulf the light blue sky, all the Fisherman can do is grip fast to the ropes and to the source of his livelihood.

Deviating from the provincial muses of his mentor Fernando Amorsolo, Abellana depicts the Fisherman in all its realism, a man hardened by days earning his keep. And yet, his signature impressionism seeps through in the vibrancy of the surrounding water, the contours on the subject’s musculature, and the manipulation of light and darkness. A certain expressionism emerges in his romanticization of this one moment in the life of an ordinary Cebuano, while not glamorizing his struggle.

In contrast to his high-class clientele, Abellana always had a penchant for everyday men and women. He was said to observe the lives of common people to translate their hand-to-mouth experiences on his canvases. In this manner, Abellana had an empathetic understanding of the working class Filipinos he painted time and time again. More than utilizing them as subjects, Martino Abellana brought the plights of ordinary people, ordinary Cebuanos, to the foreground in a national arena that would have been content to ignore their existence.