Renowned classicist Elias Laxa drew inspiration from his provincial life in Pampanga; originating from the river town of Guagua, Laxa’s penchant for seaside and landscape paintings became one of the most valuable vignettes of Philippine art. The seas feature heavily in his 1961 and 1963 pieces. Both situated on the shores, the pieces humanize the landscape, with the beach populated with people. In the 1961 piece, f ishing boats are in the water, and a fisherman rests on his boat ashore, looking through the horizon; meanwhile, the 1963 work twists the often bereft shores as Laxa goes the opposite direction and populates the beach with an ambling crowd. Both pieces are dominated by blues and browns, bringing a sense of familiarity and nostalgia to his works, as is often the case with his seascapes. Laxa’s genre pieces also had a hand in cementing his name among the patrons of the Philippine art scene. This untitled piece from the mid-1960s features a bustling marketplace rendered in Laxa’s colorful swift brush strokes, the scene awash in soft sunlight. Despite the crowd’s size, the hubbub is depicted with a serenity almost always reserved for the quaint provincial life. “Laxa seems bent on pursuing these mysteries of nature relentlessly,” Alfredo Roces once said about his works. Indeed, Laxa’s folk genre and seascapes work manage to incorporate the best of his works – they are an authentic view of the days long past that cements the artist as an enduring classical painter, his classicist style and usage of light colors in this work evoking a soothing and serene atmosphere. (Hannah Valiente)