DESPITE his acclaimed artworks, businessman-artist Joey Velasco still doesn’t like to be labeled a painter. He prefers to be called a “heartist’.
“I make it a point that I experienced first what I feel strongly about before I paint something,” Velasco told the Varsitarian.
Indeed, Velasco uses his heart most especially in depicting the sad reality of the oppressed in most of his paintings. According to Antonio Meloto, executive director of Gawad Kalinga, Velasco’s paintings are meant to make their audience see the suffering of the unfortunate.
“His art pictures realistically portray the presence of Jesus so that if you look at it and call yourself a Christian, you should be moved to love the underprivileged,” Meloto added.
In his latest one-man painting exhibit, Kalakbay: A Journey of Faith in Art, which opened last June 25 at the Beato Angelico Gallery, viewers agreed that something in his works tugged at their hearts. Curator Mary Ann Bulanadi confirmed the appeal of the artwork.
“There was something in his paintings that drew me to them,” Bulanadi said.
In his own version of Christ’s Last Supper on a 4×8 canvas, Hapag ng Pag-asa, Velasco touches on the reality of poor street-children. The genre work’s original characters are replaced by street urchins and from children from Manila and Quezon City. Other than Hapag ng Pag-asa’s generous hues and shades, the emotions of the poor children radiate outstandingly. The stories of these children are featured in Velasco’s book, They Have Jesus: The Stories of the Children of ‘Hapag’, launched last December.
Meanwhile, Velasco significantly illustrates the plight of Filipino farmers of a disputed hacienda in La Castellana in Negros Occidental in his other version of the Last Supper, Kalakbay. The painting’s gloomy ambiance invokes the disheartened expressions of landless farmers.
However, before the painting was finished, his two subjects, Alejandro Garcesa and Ely Tupas were killed last June 4, when the landlord’s security men allegedly attacked the protesting farmers. The two farmers were members of Task Force Mapalad, a peasant organization in Negros Occidental that aims for the distribution of the hacienda lands. Velasco felt a particular attachment to the painting because it gave him a sign of the impending demise of his subjects through the skull, which he included in his painting.
“As I look at the skull at the lower right corner of my painting, I smell the smell of death. Then, I remember their faces last March when we where attending Mass under their worn-out tent,” Velasco said.
Other notable paintings by Velasco exhibit his artistic spirit of showing God’s presence in our society today, like Atrofia, which reinvents the portrait of the prodigal son with an old man embracing Christ.
Gusto ko Maging Bayani, on the other hand is an example of Velasco’s secular paintings implying nationalism through a child holding a mask of Jose Rizal.
Hope in paintings
Although not a Fine Arts graduate, Velasco has done works that have attracted both art connoisseur and layperson.
Velasco said he was influenced by his high school teachers at Don Bosco Pampanga such us Norman Sustiguer and the late Fr. Chito Dajao. But he says his paintings were not results of his skills alone, but also of “divine intervention.”
Velasco was a Salesian seminarian before he started manufacturing religious decorations and became a family man with four children. It was only in 2005, after a miraculous recovery from a kidney disease that he rediscovered his inclination toward painting.
“The paint brush moves by itself,” Velasco said, describing the spontaneity he feels when he paints.
Using grisaille, a French monochromatic technique that stresses the contrast between a figure and its dark gray background before finally applying the layers of paint, Velasco was able to draw audience’s attention to his subjects. But what made his paintings exceptional are the emotions they arouse from spectators. His paintings do not dictate or preach. They simply show the relevance of Christ’s intercession in our society today, most especially for the marginalized.
His paintings, which resemble the works of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, have been featured not only in galleries, but also in schools, seminaries, and churches. Although he declines to sell his works, he uses them to move people to support charities like Gawad Kalinga. Also by portraying Christ in local and modern setting in his paintings, Velasco says he’s able to bring Christ closer to Filipino.
“His works are a good example of paintings which employed contextualization and inculturation,” said Bulanadi. Levine Andro H. Lao and Samuel Raphael Medenilla
