ABOUT THE WORK

The artist fits the two figures doing a grueling task by means of by minute but pronounced distortions to the general design. The style is more of a welcome book illustration than realist. David is engaged in labor through the brawny contortions of bodies. The rural proletariat is endowed here with a tortured yet elegiac quality more found in the mid-70s depictions of the peasantry in social realist art. His painting has all the ennui of the doldrums of hard labor, but Dizon endows it with a human hint of anecdote. Dizon emphasizes linear and structural composition above other pictorial elements in his work. Although Dizon always achieves a lightness of touch in his linearity, his concern for structure remains evident. The sewali juxtaposed against the crumpled shirts in the painting provides a similar satisfaction to that obtained by exploring the detailed wall ornament of period architecture. Yet the realism is expressed in the despairing and debauched faces of the men (the third man, in the middle, is curiously blindfolded). These figures — anonymous, swathed in - are enduring memorials of human grit.