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Monday, February 17, 2025

Holding the line: Elmer Borlongan and the virtues of drawing

Any art professor worth their salt always emphasizes that developing drawing must become almost second nature to the art student. Drawing is a muscle that needs to be trained and developed.

In this day and age, where contemporary art focuses on experiential, conceptual, and performance-based approaches, drawing seems to have been deemed passé. Yet, it endures despite the shifting fads and trends of the fickle—and frankly, myopic—Philippine art market.

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Among those who still value the skill of drawing is artist Elmer Borlongan, who spoke at Ayala Museum’s Zobel Art Conversations: Exploring the Creative Process on Feb. 1, just in time to kick off National Arts Month.

Borlongan emphasizes that drawing is about exploration, which is among the bedrock skills required to become a serious visual artist. He says drawing is allied to “Traditional approaches to painting [which] are really important.” One must go through the motions of learning to sketch the right way by studying anatomy and perspective.

The rigorous study of drawing, which involves the dynamism of a moving point and shifting line, would be the easy part. Borlongan opines, “The most difficult thing for an artist is searching for your identity.”

Drawing is a skill, yet mastering the skill is not enough. Technically, one can be a master at “capturing” reality. But is mimicry or imitation the point of art production?

Borlongan insists that art is about how the artist becomes enmeshed with the artwork: “[It is crucial to know] how you inject yourself.”

Many may disregard drawing as merely a primary skill mired in academic art, yet I argue that drawing is part of the implementation of another important approach to the process—thinking and observing.

Anthropologists have written about drawing as a valid mode of seeing the world and funneling what you see onto pen and paper. Drawing is an act of thinking.

Borlongan shares this sentiment: “[Through drawing, I] interpret the subjects I have been working on; exaggerate the elements in my work.” Exaggeration is a cornerstone of artistic expression, from the willowy light extensions in the flight of ballerinas to the centuries-old Noh masks in Japanese traditional theater. The bulging eyes—some unsettling to look at—in his visual language of surly bald men are among the modes of exaggeration in Borlongan’s works.

Talks like these are vital in the wake of the emergence and entrenchment of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some art students engage in AI “to help” their art production, believing it allows them to work at a more efficient rate.

Some scoff at drawing as not “contemporary,” and it shows in certain so-called contemporary artists who rely more on bombast than actual skill. I assert that the contemporary respects or acknowledges history as one approaches innovation. But all expressions are rooted in the formidable line of drawing.

These are the building blocks of visual language, much like the alphabet forming the words that lead to sonnets, epics, and novels. One must go through the lines of drawing before crossing the line, hoping to find the visual identity they wish to populate—whichever surface they choose to draw on.

You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social

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