On the crest of a wave

If David Hockney has now been anointed Britain's Greatest Living Treasure, then there is little doubt who is the greatest master of the past.

J M W Turner is beloved not just in his home country as the supreme English water colourist but internationally as one of the true giants of art. We like him here for the extraordinary way in which he pictured the sea and the scenery suffused with light and mist and mood. Abroad, they admire him most for the way that he pushed painting, in oil as in watercolour, to the extreme edges of representation to the point where it became virtually abstract.

You can see that point and Turner's constant experiments with effect in a glorious show of some 80 of his works at the new Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, built on the spot where Turner came every year to stay in the boarding house run by his mistress, Mrs Booth. Opened last year, it's a space, designed by David Chipperfield Architects, full of light and height. Both are needed for Turner's later work, where space and light themselves become the subject of his art.

So far, Turner Contemporary, a group founded 10 years ago, has concentrated almost exclusively on modern art from here and abroad. This is its first exhibition of its namesake and one, fittingly perhaps, which has been curated not by themselves but by the directors of the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg and the Muzeum Narodowe in Krakow in Poland, where it has already been shown before arriving here.

All to the good, one might say. The temptation of a home-grown exhibition would have been to concentrate on Turner's work done in Margate and the north Kent Coast, which he loved. But, while this show does include half-a-dozen of his local views, including some brilliant studies of the skies and clouds viewed from the harbour, the curators this time have ignored place and gone for what makes Turner incomparable as an artist: his determination to capture nature itself in all its moods and energy.

Its title, Turner and the Elements, says it all. Turner, so the thesis goes, lived at a time when science was breaking down all the old divisions of nature – in this case the four classical elements of fire, water, earth and air – and replacing them with a nature far more fluid and dynamic. Turner was the artistic expression of it.

That may well be a somewhat over-didactic view of a man so resolutely down to earth and taciturn as Turner, an old grouch if ever there was one and mean to boot, if the recollections of his mistress are anything to go by. Turner knew and was friends with scientists of his day and he was certainly interested in theory, particularly of colour. But it is hard to see him driven by the theories of science. What he set out to do, from his early days of embracing the romantic theories of the "sublime" in nature, was to depict sensation – the sensations experienced at sunrise and sunlight, in storm and dead calm, in rain and mist.

The division of the works into the four elements proves, however, a surprisingly effective way of witnessing his ambition as he develops and pushes his skills. You start with "earth" and the classic watercolour views of mountain and gorges, in which the artist expresses the sublime in the majesty of nature. But as his art progresses, the outlines are blurred and the forms dissolve into each other in the fluidity of the watercolour and the confidence of the brush.

With "fire" it is the same. The paintings start with the depiction of the event, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the burning of the House of Commons. But by the end it is the colour and energy of the fire itself that obsesses the artist, while with "water" and "air" the progression from observation to pure sensation is even more complete.

Move on into the room of "fusion", when Turner abandons all divisions between components, and you are taken into works so far ahead of their time that you have to look twice at the dating to believe them. In watercolours such as Colour Beginning of 1820 and the The Rainbow of the same period or Mont Saint Michel of 1827, you are privy to a mind that is attempting (and succeeding) to find a means for painting to express the essence not the appearance of nature. Of course, these are colour sketches, the workings of a mind experimenting with technique, not the finished products. There is always a danger with Turner in reflecting backwards a modern vision of a man whose aims were often more conventional and backward looking.

But if you doubt Turner's intentions, a final section shows this extraordinary artist translating what he was experimenting with watercolour into the much less malleable medium of oil. Paintings such as Stormy Sea with Dolphins of 1835-40 (spot the dolphins if you can), Shade and Darkness – the Evening of the Deluge from 1843 and Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth of 1842 are just stunning in the clear light of the Turner Contemporary building. They have titles. Turner has even added "the author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich" to his snow storm scene. They have subjects. But in the end they are beyond that. They are as near as you can get to abstraction without going the full hog. No wonder the American abstract expressionist, Mark Rothko, revered him and donated nine of his Four Seasons paintings to the Tate to hang near the Turners.

More Kupka at Kampa Museum

The Kampa Museum's already rich collection of artworks by Frantisek Kupka, a seminal Czech abstract painter who spent most of his life in France, will soon be even richer, as the museum has purchased the collection of American art historian Lilli Lonngren Anders.

"In total, it is 41 works of art, including an interesting oil painting, Portrait of Kupka's Step-daughter AndrEe (1906), which foreshadows his later abstract period," says Jii Machalicky, curator of the Kampa Museum.

The museum foundation paid half a million U.S. dollars for the collection, which many consider a very good price for the oil paintings, drawings, studies and documents.

Should a competition for the most influential painter of the 20th-century avant-garde ever be held, only a few names would be considered, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, all of whom are today some of the most expensive artists on the market.

Though he may not be as internationally recognized as those names, Kupka commands high prices around the world. For instance, in March 2009, Kupka's painting Zhrouceni vertikal (Breakdown of Verticals) from 1935 was sold for nearly 26 million Kc.

"This past summer, Kupka's painting Movement from the Hascoe Collection sold for 43 million Kc, but this painting didn't go to the Czech Republic; the buyer was foreign," says Jan Skivanek, editor-in-chief of Art & Antiques magazine.

"The thing with Kupka is there are only a few oil paintings on the market, and he is not frequently a part of auctions. Kupka's paintings appear rarely. This fact undermines the price rise. This is not the case of, say, Picasso, whose paintings are not rare on the market," Skivanek adds.

Kupka's paintings can easily find buyers on the market, but studies and graphics are a harder sell, as there have been cases of counterfeit pieces in the past, and buyers are now generally cautious.

The authenticity of the collection purchased by the Kampa Museum, however, is not up for dispute. Lonngren Anders met the elderly Czech painter before his death in 1957 as she "was a young art historian sent to Paris by former Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred Barr Jr., who considered Kupka the first abstract painter and wanted to find out what was his basis, starting points, how he got to the abstraction," Machalicky says.

Included in the collection are also some documents and original catalogs of Kupka's exhibitions, some with Kupka's own notes about prices, which are perfect material for further studies. Though the collection contains mainly works on paper and small studies, which are not even watercolors but simply drawings that would be not as easy to sell as large paintings, for a museum it is perfect material.

"It is a superb collection, and one of the reasons Lonngren Anders sold it for such a good price was she wanted to keep the collection together and also pass it on to some museum where Kupka is the main star," Skivanek says.  

Kupka was born in 1871 in Opocno, east Bohemia, and first studied to be a saddler. The young man soon established a small painting workshop and then went on to study painting at the Prague Art Academy in 1886. Later, he studied in Vienna, and then he moved to Paris to attend the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1905, he moved to Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, where he died in 1957.

The Kampa Museum opened in September 2001, and since then has become an important part of the Prague art scene. The museum shows the Central European art collection that Jan and Meda Mladek amassed in their American exile, together with the collection of Jii and Běla Kola and works by Jindich Chalupecky as well as temporary exhibitions. Also in the permanent collection are a large number of works by Otto Gutfreund and, of course, Frantisek Kupka.

David Hockney's Yorkshire

It might seem unlikely but the west coast of America and the east coast of Yorkshire have something in common. According to David Hockney, it's "big skies" and you get a sense of what he means at his new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Better still, if you go to the Yorkshire Wolds, not only do you see what he means but you're also rewarded with an unheralded and unspoilt slice of England.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is both a celebration of the artist's return to his roots and of a subtle, spacious and remote landscape. Hockney once drew inspiration from the exotic climes of Los Angeles, but for several years he's been back in England, living and working in Bridlington (he was born in Bradford). Explaining what drew him to East Yorkshire and the Wolds, he said: "It's a landscape that I've known since childhood [he used to work in the fields and cycled the roads as a teenager], so it has meaning, but I never thought of it as a subject until 10 years ago. It is full of lovely little valleys and not many people."

Perhaps surprisingly, it's a region that never previously troubled great landscape painters such as Turner and Constable, but this exhibition at the Royal Academy, comprising some 150 works, the majority inspired by East Yorkshire and dating from the past four years (and quite a few from the past 12 months), shows the area in a new light.

Clearly Hockney, now 74, has been energised and enthused by the task, which has allowed him to explore his fascination with landscape and the seasons, and to capture them in a variety of media, from oil and watercolour to iPad, computer and on film.

I began my Hockney trail away from the Wolds in West Yorkshire at Saltaire, not far from Hockney's birthplace. Here Salts Mill, a beautifully restored Victorian textile mill, houses the world's largest permanent collection of Hockney's work.

The mill, a painting of which features in the RA exhibition, was the brainchild of Titus Salt, a Nonconformist mill owner and philanthropist who also built houses for his workers – still there and now privately owned – a fine Italianate church, a school, a hospital and a lovely park. Sobriety and hard work were all he asked in return.

In the 1850s, Salts Mill was the largest factory in Europe and the fact that it is still standing proud is down to the foresight of the late Jonathan Silver, an entrepreneur and friend of Hockney who bought the building in 1987 and created what it is today: a gallery and arts centre run by his family with several high-end shops, a restaurant and a smart café.

Like Hockney, Silver was born in Bradford and it was he who was instrumental in getting the artist to use Yorkshire as a subject once again. That was back in 1997 following a prolonged stay in his home county by Hockney, who then painted the Wolds from memory when he returned to Los Angeles.

However, it is not just the landscape that is eye-catching. As we wound our way through the lanes we passed a host of architecturally impressive villages, such as Lund (home of The Wellington, an excellent pub), South Dalton (where you'll find the Michelin-rated Pipe and Glass Inn, recently voted the UK's pub of the year, and St Mary's Church with a spire once described as "an arrow in the breast of the Wold"), Londesborough (fine parkland) and Warter (outside of which Hockney painted his vast canvas Bigger Trees Near Warter, currently on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford).

There are country houses too, none better than Sledmere House, owned by Sir Tatton Sykes, whose family have been important players in the region since the middle of the 18th century. Although gutted by a fire in 1911, the Georgian house was beautifully restored and Hockney, a friend of Sykes, celebrated his 70th birthday there.

Not to be outdone, the estate village of Sledmere itself is another attraction, with its immaculately kept red-brick houses and a fine pub, The Triton Inn.

Leaving Saltaire and heading across Yorkshire towards the Wolds – a crescent of chalk hills and dry valleys running from the Humber Estuary to Flamborough Head – you begin to discover what Hockney sees in the area: a "spatial experience", as he has put it.

Edith Devaney, co-curator of the RA exhibition, said the reason he left England was for "the light and space of America's west coast. Now he has come back and found it here." West Yorkshire may be wilder (and attract more people), but here on the east coast this undulating, manicured, arable landscape offers a kind of freedom and wide-open views, while the changeable weather, distinct seasons and light (because of the proximity to the North Sea) have also fuelled the artist's vivid imagination. It's also a region that Hockney defends passionately; last year saw him attacking plans to build several "ugly" wind turbines in the Wolds.

With many foot and cycle paths, it's not a difficult place to explore but we did it an even easier way – by car. In the company of two engaging locals, David and Susan Neave, historians and friends of Hockney, I headed for the particular spots that have inspired him, driving along Woldgate, a quiet country road, that has been a fruitful source of work: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, for example, forms the centrepiece of the RA show and comprises one huge oil painting and 51 iPad prints.

At Artists' Gallery, it's about individual messages

Group exhibits tend to feature an assortment of subjects treated in several different mediums. The "All Member Holiday Show" at the Artists' Gallery in downtown Columbia showcases local artists who instinctively seem to favor the mediums best-suited for their individual messages.

Bonita Glaser's watercolor "Deep Into Winter," for instance, is a landscape that is compositionally anchored by a barn. What really makes this watercolor hold your attention, though, are the blue shadows cast against a snowy field. The watercolor medium lends itself to the gently impressionistic, blue-tinged effects achieved here.

Another medium with softening tendencies is pastel, which Barbara Steinacker deploys in "Nantucket Surf." This atmospheric picture has a yellow sky atop pink-hued waves and shoreline. There is even more pronounced melting in Deborah Maklowski's pastel "Aquifer," in which the landscape amounts to the melding together of various colors.

Just as Maklowski flirts with abstraction, another artist in the show nearly leaves realism behind. Kathleen Schuman's oil and gesso "Ancient Forest" is a densely worked painting whose various shades of brown make it resemble a forest floor whose leaves turned to compost a long time ago.

The artists here who are working in oil generally make paintings that take advantage of the representational clarity that can be achieved with this medium. Even when they deliberately blur portions of the picture for strategic effect, there is a straightforward presentation of the subject matter.

Nancy Lee Davis has a selection of oil paintings whose small size encourages you to pull up close to see subjects including a child in a "Yellow Dress." The title is significant in terms of this artist's intentions, because that dress is much more assertively defined than the indistinctly rendered child wearing it.

Davis works within the venerable still-life tradition in paintings including "Two Cherries" and "Orange," which both seem good enough to eat. She also proves that a painter can make a portrait out of just about anything in "Lurking Cow."

Painted portraits have a way of making you feel as if you are meeting somebody eye to eye — and we're not just talking cows here. One of the best examples in the exhibit is Pat Roberie's oil painting "The Jazz Man," whose gray-haired subject has done some serious living.

By way of contrast to such direct figuration, Myung Kim's ink on rice paper "Floating People" only alludes to the human presence via the scribbled, thin black lines that schematically represent tiny people. The abstracted humans float against a pale green and blue background.

Among photographers in the exhibit, some of the best work comes from those who take full advantage of that medium's crisp and colorful attributes.

John Stier's "Yellowstone in Winter" calls your attention to the craggy details of a snowcapped peak. Ann Eid's "Evening" invites you to peer through a window at a house's lamp-illuminated interior. And Jerry Weinstein's "Rust" presents an old car whose metal body is so completely rusted out that it seems like a 20th-century fossil nestled within a weed-filled yard.

Oil Paintings on Display at the Library

Robert White didn’t grow up in a wealth family.

But the Oswego resident didn’t need the best toys and games to keep him busy. Instead, White would look for the nearest paper and pencil.

“I remember seeing a drawing of something as a kid, and I said I wanted to do that,” White said. “Once I started drawing I didn’t want to stop. I just kept doing it.”

Years later, while White was in the army, his corporal officer asked him to create some murals for the walls of the barracks.

White happily obliged.

“I was impressed with the fact that I could show my fellow soldiers what I could do,” he said.

His passion for painting began then.

“I enjoyed the smell of the paint, the mixing of the paint,” he said. “It’s a medium most people think is hard to control but I wanted to be good at something. When I got out of the army, that’s what I kept doing.”

Some of White’s oil paintings are currently on display in the Yorkville Public Library. Library personnel regularly showcase artwork from area residents on the library's second floor. Exhibits usually change each six to eight weeks.

White enjoys painting animals and landscapes. He also incorporates a spiritual theme into his work.

“In the past I thought of myself as a starving artist until I looked at my waistline,” White said with a laugh. “Then I called myself a God artist. Because the talent He gave to me. I’m a freelance artist with a God touch.”

Library employee Sharyl Iwanski lauds White’s paintings.

“His work is very vivid and colorful,” she said.

White, who also works as a security guard, has shown his work at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago and the Oswego Public Library.

He hopes he can be an inspiration to others, especially juveniles and teenagers.

“Even though we were poor growing up, I realized I could still make a difference,” White said. “Now I’m trying to encourage kids and teenagers that if you’re not sure what you want to do, just try something and stay positive about whatever they want to do.”

White visited the Art Institute of Chicago for the first time a few years ago with his daughter.

“I loved it,” he said. “As I was viewing it I was thinking, ‘Am I that good?’ I just wanted to keep focusing on trying to be as good as the masters. I’m not perfect but I try to be the best I can be. I enjoy doing it. Most people call it a hobby. I call it a passion.”

'We don't think it's a painting of Emily'

The Bronte Society has cast doubt on claims a painting being auctioned in Northampton this month is a portrait of the famous literary figure Emily Bronte.

Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, said the society doubted the provenance of the oil painting and would not be bidding on it next Thursday.

“We are not 100 per cent convinced it is Emily. There isn’t enough provenance on the painting and there is an element of doubt about it,” she said.

“There are two portraits of Emily, both in the National Portrait Gallery, and they don’t bare a striking resemblance to this one. The experts are saying the woman in the painting is wearing the kind of clothes Emily would have worn, which probably thousands of other women of that period were wearing. They have done a huge amount of research on that painting but we are still not convinced.”

But art experts, who have assessed the picture, say there is strong evidence to suggest it could be of Emily Bronte.

The oil painting, which shows a young woman wearing a straw bonnet held in place by a silk scarf, was painted earlier than previously thought.

The picture, recently given to auctioneers J P Humbert of Northamptonshire by a retired headmaster, was found to have been painted circa 1840, making it contemporary with the age of the possible subject – Emily Bronte died in 1848.

It is almost identical to a print of a portrait of the writer published in the July 1894 issue of The Woman At Home, which itself was attributed to Charlotte Bronte. It is thought the artist responsible for the newly-found picture may be John Hunter Thompson of Bradford who was a portrait artist and friend of Emily’s brother Branwell.

As well as that, written on the back is “Emily Bronte – Sister of Charlotte B... Currer Bell”, and on the backing paper “Emily Bronte/Sister of Charlotte Bronte/Ellis Bell”. Currer and Ellis Bell were the pen names of Charlotte and Emily Bronte from the winter of 1845 when the sisters published their poems and adopted pen names.

Auctioneer Jonathan Humbert said the attribution confirms that the portrait is earlier than previously thought.

“After much research, we are confident this portrait, recently discovered, is of Emily Bronte,” he said.

“So many factors support this contention and, as such, this represents a very important study of one of English literature’s most perennial figures.”

The oil on panel painting is set to go on sale at JP Humbert Auctioneers in Towcester, Northants, at a provisional estimate of 10,000 to 15,000.

The sale coincides with an auction where the society will be bidding for a rare Charlotte Bronte manuscript the Young Men’s Magazine.

Rouen Cathedrals' at LACMA

Sometimes a museum exhibition that sounds like a natural turns out to be anything but. That's the odd case with a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which juxtaposes five gorgeous paintings by Impressionist icon Claude Monet (1840-1926) with five handsome ones by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). For all the visual firepower of the individual works, as a show it's strangely flat and uninvolving.

By all means don't miss it — if not for the Lichtensteins, which have been shown at LACMA before (they belong to L.A. collectors Eli and Edythe Broad), then for the Monets. I doubt that five paintings from his pivotal series showing the soaring Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral have ever been seen at once in Los Angeles before, and these five are fantastic. (The Getty Museum also owns a beautiful example, painted in the silvery light of morning.) They come from major public collections of Impressionist paintings — two from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which co-organized the show with LACMA, and three from Paris' Musée d'Orsay.

The Monet cathedral paintings occupy two walls. On a third wall to the right are Lichtenstein's 1969 cathedral views -- larger, sleeker and painted by hand in small dots, the artist's familiar adaptation of modern commercial printing techniques. Each Lichtenstein is a two-color painting.

Some, such as the ones composed from interlocking red and yellow dots or blue and yellow dots, read as crisp, clear images of the church. Others, like the ones in yellow and white or blue and black, are so close in color values as to require scrutiny to make out the image. The yellow and white allude to blinding sunlight, the blue and black to the dead of night -- extreme daytime and nighttime interruptions in the ordinary practice of seeing.

The five pictures, each more than 5 feet high and 3 1/2 feet wide, are installed close together, side by side. Appropriately, the lineup is almost like sheets rolling off an assembly line or proofs from a printing press. In a media environment, reproduction rather than light creates or obscures the view; Lichtenstein refocuses attention on painting.

The Monets do too, but in a dramatically different way. In the late winter and early spring of 1892 and 1893 he painted about 30 versions, finishing what he started on site in Rouen back in his Giverny studio, closer to Paris. (Rouen is about 80 miles northwest of the capital.) These canvases, often intense, are smaller than the Lichtensteins — no dimension is more than 40 inches — and more chromatically diverse. In painting the effects of light and atmosphere at different times of day and under various weather conditions, Monet's broken brushwork used just about every oil color in the painter's arsenal.

The cathedral facade, seen here at a slight angle from the picture plane, nearly fills the entire composition. Only a small patch of sky is glimpsed at the top between the two front towers. Rouen offered Monet an intricately detailed stone surface, built over six centuries and marked by a seemingly infinite array of nooks, crannies and shadow patterns.

He chose to represent that surface — strong, sturdy, magnificently articulated and inseparable from his nation's long and splendid cultural history — by drawing a direct comparison between the church facade and his own painting's surface. Each work is heavily encrusted with densely layered colors, asserting the artist's lengthy labors in constructing the picture. It swallows up extreme nuances of dramatic visual knowledge gained over time. It represents the spiritual glorification of secular faith.

Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings transfer the enduring power of epic masonry from religion to art. In their vibrant, light-filled stylistic innovation, they put dynamic change on an equal footing with heroic constancy.

So, given these two major artists, why doesn't the exhibition resonate? Partly it's just a matter of unequal weight. The balance seems out of whack.

The Lichtenstein paintings are very good, but his best works are the comic book and advertising paintings he began in 1961, as well as the reflection-free mirror paintings he started work on at the same time as the "Rouen Cathedral" series. Monet, by contrast, is in peak form here: He made other paintings just as great, but none greater.

Poor Lichtenstein. Monet's voluptuary, arduous surfaces keep drawing you away.

More inexpedient is the show's forced point. Was Lichtenstein putting his work in direct dialogue with Monet's, as is implied here? Not really. Whatever conversation there is between them is only indirect.

Monet's paintings didn't inspire Lichtenstein; photographs did. Monet was responding to the surface realities of light on the facade of Rouen Cathedral; Lichtenstein was responding to the surface realities of mass reproduction. For Lichtenstein the Monet cathedrals, while not entirely incidental, are just a distant background story. They're almost like academic footnotes.

A wall text explains the show's rationale. In 1968, Pasadena Art Museum curator John Coplans organized a famously influential exhibition titled "Serial Imagery." Lichtenstein saw it. He was impressed by artists who, rather than making singular masterpieces, were engaged in exploring paintings and sculptures in series.

Coplans' artists were as diverse as Josef Albers, with his precisely nested color squares, and Morris Louis, who poured rivulets of paint. The curator traced their origins back to Monet, whose "Rouen Cathedral" paintings are offered as a foundational masterstroke of serial imagery.

But are the Monet's really serial images? Critic Brian O'Doherty once noted that Coplans didn't make the necessary distinction between series (paintings on the same theme or subject) and serial (paintings based on systems). Therein lies the essential difference between the cathedral pictures of Monet and Lichtenstein. Monet explored multiple permutations of one theme, while Lichtenstein investigated mass-media systems, jolting life into otherwise deadened reproduction techniques.

Ironically, when I saw the show a work from LACMA's permanent collection happened to be installed in another gallery just around the corner, and it resonates in a more revealing way. In 1971, Andy Warhol silk-screened 100 plain wooden crates to look like corrugated cardboard shipping cartons that contain boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Warhol was nearing the end of his most innovative period -- the 1973 portraits of Chairman Mao would be his last hurrah -- but the boxes still exploit the sharp visual puns that dominate his great '60s work.

Botong Francisco’s paintings at PGH find new home

Four of the best-kept secrets among art enthusiasts in Manila are the monumental oil paintings by National Artist Carlos V. Francisco entitled “The Progress of Medicine in the Philippines," which have been quietly keeping an eye on thousands of poor patients and dedicated health professionals passing through the humid and crowded main foyer of a public hospital for a long time.

On Sept. 21, the four-panel paintings will be declared a national treasure for being an “irreplaceable part of the institutional heritage of the Philippine General Hospital and the University of the Philippines, and of the cultural heritage of the nation."

Also on Wednesday, the little-known panels will be formally unveiled as the permanent exhibit at the elegant Museum Foundation of the Philippines Hall, the newest of the 11 galleries at the National Museum that are now open to the public.

Last July 23, National Museum director Jeremy Barns led a team that removed the original four panels from the PGH foyer, where they had remained for 58 years, and installed the reproductions done by photographer and art expert Benigno Toda III.

Four days later, the original paintings were mounted at the National Museum. The oil-on-canvas panels measuring 2.92 meters by 2.76 meters depict the history and development of medicine in the country from the pre-colonial period, the Spanish colonial period, the American Occupation era, and the modern era of the 1950s.

Ana Maria Theresa P. Labrador, the National Museum technical adviser for research and museology, noted that the paintings are “the least written about of all the artistic works of Carlos V. Francisco."

Labrador sought to erase misperceptions that the panels are murals and not paintings. “Murals are defined as paintings done directly on the wall and have been conceived as integral to the architecture. These paintings are not murals since they have been commissioned in 1953, 43 years after the PGH opened to the public. The paintings are also movable, having been relocated from the PGH lobby to the National Museum," she said.

Botong Francisco genuinely deserves all the attention that the National Museum is giving him these days. After all, it was the institution that first crowned Botong nationally for his artistry.

On July 1948, Botong bagged the grand prize for his “Kaingin" painting during the historic 1st national exhibit of the Art Association of the Philippines held at the National Museum. The victory signified that the local art establishment had officially acknowledged his talent as one of the country’s premier artists.

Born on Nov. 4, 1912 in Angono, Rizal to a family of modest means, Botong disheartened painter Fabian dela Rosa, the first dean of the UP School of Fine Arts, when his brilliant student from 1930 to 1935 dropped out one semester short of graduation due to poverty.

Some of the priceless pieces done by Botong, Francisco’s nickname given to him after an olive-skinned person in Cainta, Rizal, who went with the same moniker, are found in the short stretch of downtown Manila from Pedro Gil Street to the Manila City Hall complex.

The St. Paul University–Manila Campus has the majestic “The Evolution of Philippine Culture" at its renovated Fleur-de-lis Theater.

Botong’s colorful “Musikong Bumbong" was once a centerpiece of the Manila Hotel’s Fiesta Pavilion while the Far Eastern University campus in Manila has his “Stations of the Cross."

At the Manila City Hall, then-Mayor Antonio Villegas commissioned Botong to execute a mural on the four walls of the building’s Bulwagang Katipunan. Botong came up with the sweeping pictorial “History of Manila," starting from the earliest dealings of the natives with Chinese traders up to the rebuilding of the city. This was his last work before he died on March 31, 1969.

Botong was conferred the National Artist Award in painting on June 12, 1973. Part of his citation read: “To the poet of Angono, no painter of his time was more closely attuned to the spirit of his land and people."

He was one of the seven artists to join classical painter Fernando C. Amorsolo, the only National Artist declared when the honor was introduced in 1972, in the second batch elevated to the pantheon of Philippine arts. “In his hands, craft and vision fused," the citation for Botong read.

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The Washington Square Chase Bank is looking for a PT Teller to work 20 hours a week. The right candidate will handle financial transactions accurately and efficiently, be able to work well in a team environment to service customer, have strong listening and verbal communication skills and be detail-oriented and organized.

A high school degree or GED is required, along with a minimum six months cash-handling experience. Must be able to work branch hours, including weekends and some evenings.

The Converse store at the Outlets is hiring Retail Staff. Duties include opening and closing store, ensuring that all visual directives, promotions, and markdowns are completed in a timely manner ensuring team members are motivated to hit them.

All candidates must successfully complete a thorough background investigation prior to receiving any final offer of employment.