Me, Picasso?

My first love was drawing.

When I was about nine or ten years old, I'd often lie on my stomach on the floor of our living room, a pencil in hand, and draw people. Mostly, it's women with big dark eyes and long hair, the kind you'd see in a Japanese animated movie.

I think I was pretty good, too. I won a couple of prizes both in grade school and high school, and whenever my classmates needed someone to make them a "love painting" (basically a 12 x 8 cardboard on which has been written, in ornate letters and beside a drawing of a love-struck couple, the lyrics of their favorite song), I was one of the two guys they approached. It seems unbelievably cheesy now, but back then it made for some really good business.

Recognizing that I had a gift, my parents got me an art tutor, a Filipino-Chinese painter named George Ng, who came to our house every Saturday and taught me all about foregrounding, balance, perspective. My dad even had a small studio built for me just beside the labahan. Its walls were made of colorful corrugated iron, making it look like a candy store, and it had waist-to-ceiling windows on all sides, so neighbors could peer in and admire my paintings.

I enjoyed the classes -- though honestly I would've enjoyed them more if they hadn't coincided with my favorite TV show that time, Roller Superstars, where two competing teams of rollerskaters raced and knocked each other out of a big circular skating rink. What I liked best about these art classes was looking at Mr. Ng's art books, which contained pictures of centuries' worth of masterpieces. I remember poring over the works of Rembrandt, Degas, Vermeer and -- Mr. Ng's favorite -- Velasquez, and wondering how I could achieve that intense shade of yellow, that subtle watery blue.

I was learning quite a lot, too. In just a couple of weeks, I'd managed to graduate from color pastels to oil, and before long I'd produced my first oil masterpiece, good enough to be framed: a very lifelike portrait of Matet de Leon, copied from some showbiz magazine. This was hung at the center of my studio, on the wall right across from the door, so everyone walking by could see how accurately I was able to capture the star of Halimaw Sa Banga.

Happy and proud though my parents were, they were bothered by one thing -- that I kept on drawing all these beautiful women. And not just ordinary beautiful women either, but women in the most exquisite evening gowns, each one with a sash saying Ms. USA or Ms. Japan. "P__," I can imagine my dad saying, "Mukhang magiging fashion designer, di painter, and anak mo ah."

And I think, without anything being said about it, that I understood that my parents were alarmed. For after a while I started hiding these drawings, as though in making them I was commiting a sin.

To my parents' credit, they didn't scold or confront me about it -- we're just not that kind of family. Instead, they tried "positive reinforcement." Seeing that I was getting to be really good at drawing female figures, my dad encouraged me to paint the almost-naked women on his beer calendars. These women weren't half as interesting as the ones in the billowing, sparkling evening gowns of my other works, but, being a compliant boy, I went and copied them, and soon I had a bunch of open-mouthed, bare-breasted women staring longingly from their wooden frames in my studio, much to the delight of the greasy talyer boys in the auto shop next to our house.

The art classes lasted only a year, eventually superseded by tae kwon do and swimming, in both of which I hopelessly floundered. But I kept on drawing and joining art competitions. The highlight of this episode of my life was winning first place in a district-level on-the-spot poster-making competition, judged by a local celebrity painter named Inday Cadapan. The theme was family solidarity and I drew a father, a mother and a son in such a way that they formed a subtle triangle on the cartolina. Triangles were supposed to symbolize solidity -- I learned that from Mr. Ng.

But I stopped painting and drawing eventually, because of an instance that looks like a bad, random scene in an otherwise logical plot.

One day, when I was about fifteen, my nanay examined the framed works hanging in my studio and said, out of nowhere, that I had no real talent and should concentrate on other things instead. She added that I couldn't even make a single decent painting without Mr. Ng's help.

I was shocked, and angry. But instead of trying to prove her wrong -- and this, I think reveals my character -- I just gave up on painting altogether. I put away my staedler and brushes and didn't touch them again.

Looking back on that day now, searching for reasons why my mom said what she said, it occurs to me that it wasn't -- couldn't have been -- the senseless cruelty that I imagined it that time. Without her explaining things to me, I have come to understand and accept that she didn't want me to be a starving artist -- which to her was what I was bound to become -- but a lawyer like my dad. And to protect me from my own surely destructive passion, she had to break my heart.

Or maybe, just maybe, she'd found -- the same way she'd find out my other secrets later on -- my hidden stash of women in their irreproachable, shining gowns. And she must have known that to save me, she'd have to look bad in my eyes.