Fruit in art
Morning walks in a gated community can be boring once you have passed through all the streets and memorized the street names. To take my mind off the effort it takes to exercise and lose weight, I tune in to my surroundings: looking at the different trees and shrubs that bloom and remembering the sequence of each; listening to the chirping of birds and trying to tell which sound comes from a particular bird; calling out to stray cats and petting those that are trusting enough to rub against my legs. Some of life’s pleasures are still free and one just has to seek them out. Even on the road, I watch people, cars, billboards, and plants. A week ago, I noticed the kaimito vendors in Diliman, a sign that summer is at hand. Kaimito is also known as star fruit for the star-like flesh inside when cut in half. As a boy, I thought balimbing was star fruit because when sliced, it produced green, five-pointed stars served with rock salt.
While most people associate summer with mangoes, melons, and watermelons, I associate summer with fruits from my childhood that rarely make an appearance in a supermarket: duhat a.k.a Java plum and siniguelas is corrupted from the Spanish “ciruelas.” It is also known as “Spanish plum” or in Mexican as “Xocotl.” Even rarer is the sweet “aratiles” that I knew from my childhood summers as “saresa,” which must have come from the Spanish “cereza.” I would climb out a second floor window from a spinster aunt’s room straight into the “saresa” tree groaning with fruit.
When looking at prewar Philippine still-life paintings, I try to identify each fruit represented and figure out if each fruit was copied from life (as it should) or invented (because a platter shows an assortment of fruits are not from the same season). One often-forgotten woman painter is Celedonia Ongpin (1896-1989), whose prewar still lifes signed simply with her nickname “Doni,” are rare and precious. There is a pastel from 1912 in the National Fine Arts Collection that depicts a basket with mangoes, kasuy, chico, papaya, chesa and siniguelas. I own a painting from 1913 that shows glistening mangosteen on a footed tray together with a peeled orange and knife on a table. An earlier woman artist, Paz Paterno (1867-1914), painted a number of “bodegones” (still life) with fruit. In one canvas you will find: langka, corn, orange, duhat, siniguelas, santik, and yesa. Looking at the fruit, I wondered why was corn included. Then I asked myself, was this painted in the Philippine summer? In a painting dated Sept. 10, 1884, she painted: mango, guava, pineapple, and an assortment of makopa strewn on a table with one open, showing its seeds. A ripe atis is also represented on the canvas, set open on a plate with part of its flesh and seeds on a silver spoon ready to be eaten.
What makes this painting relevant historically is the fact that some of the fruits represented on the canvas as actually “immigrants” to our shores, they are not originally from the Philippines. Atis, pineapple, and guava are from Mexico.
Historian Isagani Medina listed other “fruit immigrants” from Mexico: Papaya, Avocado aka Alligator Pear, Anonas aka Custard Apple, Guyabano aka Sour Sop, Camachile, the fruit not the biscuit that is known in Iloilo as “kinamunsil” from the Mexican “Cuauhmochitl huamuche” or “cuamuchil,” Chico aka Sapodilla from the Mexican Tzapotl, Siniguelas, Kaimito, and Aratiles. Doreen Fernandez added to the list: Balimbing, Camote from the Mexican “Camotli” rendered in English as “sweet potato,” Singkamas from the Mexican Xicamatl or Jicama rendered in English as “Mexican Yam,” Kamatis translates to tomato from the Mexican Tomatl, and last but not least Cacao from the Mexican “Cacahuatl” that is technically a fruit but we take it as a beverage: tsokolate, tsikolate, or hot chocolate. One could say the same thing about kasoy, which is eaten as a nut rather than a fruit. You can tell Mexicans from the Pinoy fruits from the te-endings: achue-te, sayo-te, camo-te, and chocola-te.
From an Ayala Museum exhibit two years ago, I remembered a Fernando Amorsolo still life from 1924 with lanzones and a work by Teodoro Buenaventura from 1929 showing suha, lanzones, atis, banana, mango, orange, and small green unripe guavas beside a silver spoon in a glass of water. Are these just representations of fruit or do they carry a deeper, hidden, meaning?
People often ask why I visit museums often just to see paintings I have already seen many times before. One learns to see by looking, it is something you can only do yourself. Each time I look at a painting or sculpture I see something I have not seen or noticed before. I have been gathering data on fruits and vegetables in art to understand how Filipino artists represent the bounty of our land. Lately, I have been looking for fish in art to figure out why our artists seem to miss the bounty of our islands and our seas. Data gathering for this project is a joy; connecting images with context and writing it up for publication or a lecture, is the real chore.
