IMPRESSIONIST Jose Mari Picornell is obsessed with the scenes he thinks will soon vanish in the areas he sees in the city as he pedals around on his trusty bike. He captures these in oil on canvas. The latest of these paintings are on view in Qube Gallery’s “Vecindad,” the artist’s fourth solo exhibit.
Jose Mari had no formal training in painting. He said he used to do watercolor paintings when he was young. When architect Pio Bonilla saw his works, he told Jose Mari that he was a natural-born painter and taught him how to paint with oils. Since then, he has been painting mostly in oils—though he says he still does watercolor, too, very, very occasionally. He has stuck to oil despite the popularity of acrylic because he finds acrylic too fast drying and is not conducive to his impressionist style of painting where he daubs a layer or layers of paint on top of another.
He explained he does not paint anything new. His subjects have to be old, to preserve them on canvas before they vanish or are replaced by modern structures. In this exhibit, he has old street corners, dilapidated house fronts (one of which, he was informed, was made of big medicine boxes the Americans brought in after the war) and colonial houses. He sometimes paints on the spot but for convenience, he does paint from pictures he takes and then adds other details to the picture when he paints it, like adding a tartanilla in front of an old house. His style of painting is “alla prima” or direct painting, applying his colors directly from his paint tubes.
“Vencindad,” according to Qube’s gallerist Pia Mercado, is a special exhibit which she herself curated. In her explanation of Jose Mari’s works, she quoted him as saying: “We, artists, see things that other people may not see such as the broken window of an old house which tells as about time passing.”