Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

Filipino artists are, of course, not immune to the seduction of flowers. Whether as still lifes or as decorative elements in domestic interiors, flowers bloom in the brilliantly painted canvases of representational or figurative artists. To be sure, flowers are the last thing one would find in the works of abstract artists. In T. S. Eliot’s ”The Waste Land,” with Eliot regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, there is a passage that describes a man bringing a bunch of hyacinths to the woman he loves. Years later, the woman wistfully remembers the incident: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago. They called me the hyacinth girl.” When it was the man’s turn to remember that incident, he said: “— Yet when we came back late, from the Hyacinth garden. / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was waiting/living nor dead, and I knew nothing / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” That passage and imagery seem appropriate when recalling the time when artist Romulo Olazo, having arrived from a Saturday Group of Artists painting session at the Flower Farm in Tagaytay, brought to his wife Patricia an armful of flowers. In this case, not hyacinths but anthuriums. For a purely cinematic scene, that incident should be filmed with a misty lens, romantically accompanied by the swelling of violins. As it turned out for the Olazo couple, more anthuriums arrived at their residence a few days later, compliments of the Flower Farm. It was as if the Flower Farm had intuited Olazo’s attraction for anthuriums, thereby accidentally, if indirectly paving the way for another theme in the art of Olazo. (Cid Reyes)