Though highly revered in art circles, the painter José Joya never achieved the status of National Artist—until in 2003, eight years after his death. Tatler Philippines paints a portrait of the master of Filipino modern art in this article:
This feature story was originally titled as José Joya: Portrait of a Master published in the September 2003 issue of Tatler Philippines. Few changes were made in the lead paragraph of this article to suit this year's publishing. Meanwhile, the body of the article that follows was copied in its entirety.
He can now rest in peace—and eternal glory. Eight years after his death, at age 63 of prostate cancer in 1995. José Tandig Joya has finally earned the country's most printed accolade—the National Artist Award for the Visual Arts—which was conferred by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on June 25 at the Malacañan Palace, together with living National Artists for Literature Virgilio Almario and Alejandro Roces, Eddie Romero for Film and Salvador Bernal for Theatre and Design.
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The award was announced in the papers on June 3, suspiciously coinciding with Joya's 72nd birthday. The honour was long overdue, since Joya, when he was alive, had been nominated several times and on as many occasions rather mysteriously bypassed for reasons now deemed petty and indefensible. But his conscience-stricken peers would not allow such injustice to continue for long and this time Joya was destined to claim the rightful prize long denied him.
The acknowledged pillar of Philippine modern art pursued his calling in a steadfast, consistent and audacious manner. For more than four decades, Joya nurtured his art, exploring its full potential from a medium of representation to modernism, and in due time transforming it into a personal iconography of abstract expressionism.
Born in 1932 in San Miguel, Bulacan, Joya was attracted to drawing early in his youth. In his book Joya on Joya, he recalls that his drawings in this earlier period became independent studies conveying distinctive expressions. He was "then primarily interested in capturing the essence of the subject and in the artistic elaboration of my concept, qualities that frequently asserted themselves in my abstract art."
Joya graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1953, magna cum laude, from the University of the Philippines' School of Fine Arts, the first to have earned such a distinction from the State university since its founding in 1908. A year before his graduation, he had won first prize from the Art Association of the Philippines for his oil painting, Approaching Storm, an early work that prefigured his obsessive unrelenting energy and dynamism.
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