Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Beginning his artistic career as a figurative painter, Jose Joya did not lose his descriptive touch despite being known primarily as a master abstractionist, an idea given credence by this work featuring a mother and child. Painted in 1989, this pastel-on-paper creation imbues the genre with soft, ethereal quality. With her face in profile and showing the stripes of herheadkerchief, the mother carries the infant — a bouncing baby — in the crook of her arm, stabilizing the tender embrace with the other hand. She wears the traditional baro’t saya, whose billowing butterfly sleeves evoke an almost transparent quality. With his sure-footed and eloquent technique, the National Artist portrays the unbreakable bond between a mother and her child.