3 Pinoy artists
Pedro was on the level of Vincent Van Gogh, who was a forgotten and ignored artist like him.
(Author's Note: As an adventurer and traveler, I have met many artists in big cities.)
Ven Igarta, Pinoy artist in New York
During the depression in the 1920s, Venancio Igarta was a peasant teenager from Sinait, Ilocos Sur, who migrated to California to work on the asparagus farms in San Leandro Valley. Disgusted at earning 15 cents an hour, he moved to the East Coast and worked as a janitor for a hospital in Philadelphia.
There, he was "discovered" by a lady doctor. Seeing a sketch pad on the table of the conference room he was cleaning, he could not resist doing a sketch. Without permission, he did an impromptu sketch from memory of a seascape in Ilocos Sur. Ven would often sketch when he felt depressed. Admiring his sketch, the lady doctor whose pad it was and who herself was an artist, gave him a scholarship to the finest school in New York.
From poverty, Ven rose to become one of the most celebrated Filipino artists after World War II. He was the first Filipino to have an exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
After soaring to the heavens, Ven plunged into darkness. He kept churning out paintings but had no exhibits. Taking apples and whisky for dinner every night while painting, he soon realized he was becoming an alcoholic. One winter night, he made a bonfire of all his dozens of paintings that would have been worth a fortune and vowed never to paint again.
He became the master mixer of a paint multinational. He did not paint for 30 years until I met him and convinced him to resurrect the dead Igarta. He went back to painting, shifting from painting oils of seascapes to "cubism" and watercolor abstract art. He had a grand exhibit at the Manila Hotel before he died.
Willy Layug, Michelangelo of the Philippines
After the "Yolanda" super hurricane, Tacloban Archbishop John Du commissioned renowned sculptor Willy Layug of San Fernando, Pampanga, whom I dubbed the "Michelangelo of the Philippines," to do a life-size statue of Our Lady of Hope. He also did a mural in the Palo Cathedral compound.