In 2002, at 74, the visual artist Malang continues to work at his craft full-time. "Painting is a hard mistress," he sighs. "If you don't pay attention to your craft, your skills will leave you. Art is more cruel than any woman."

Heavy with honors (a Ten Outstanding Young Men [TOYM] Award in 1963; an Araw ng Maynila Award in 1981; a Gawad CCP para sa Sining in 1994), his every exhibit sold out, the painter says he still learning to paint. "My education is not complete."

Malang is an old man in a hurry. "I don't wait for my muses," he says. "I just paint. Of course you must aspire to excellence, but don't ever think it will come to you overnight. Excellence comes little by little — so you paint and paint until you drop."

His engaging optimism — his art without angst — is one secret of Malang's commercial success. His humorist's view of life and art is spontaneously fanciful and playful, rather than satiric. He refuses to take the world — or himself — seriously.

Starting out as an illustrator or newspaper cartoonist at the Manila Chronicle, Malang metamorphosed into a painter renowned for his supremacy in color. Malang's art, the critic E. Aguilar Cruz noted, bears the “stamp of that quality Filipino art lovers mean when they say ‘Filipino’.”

Shrugging off praise, as he would shrug off criticism, Malang turns back to his easel or his drawing table: to his private celebrations of Creation. "Painting should not be work," Marc Chagall once said. To Malang, in the serene twilight of his life, painting is prayer.

Published in 2002 by Crucible Workshop

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