As a young man, painter Norberto “Lito” Carating aspired to the highest art: He wanted to make music. Specifically, he wanted to sing opera.
His parents, however, thought a musician’s life too uncertain, so he decided to enroll at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts instead, where the advertising design course seemed to offer more prospects of gainful employment.
But even after he had begun to make a name for himself as one of the emerging artists of the ’70s, the desire to make music remained strong.
He enrolled with private voice teachers and earned a scholarship to the University of the East College of Music from the Music Promotion Foundation. He sang onstage in the Philippines, United States and Canada.
Then, in 1981, his twin sister Teodora died unexpectedly. A connection that had been there since birth was suddenly gone.
“I lost the passion for singing,” says Carating.
He soldiered on until 1985, but the spark had gone out. His final performance was in “La Loba Negra,” Fides Cuyugan Asensio’s operatic adaptation of Virginia Moreno’s “Itim Asu.”
He had been painting all the while, but he threw himself into his work with redoubled intensity, discovering the painful truth that you can only serve one muse.
He had already won some acclaim for his figurative and expressionist “Laman Lupa,” “Barong-barong” and “Anilao” series, but when he decided to recommit himself to painting, he abandoned all recognizable forms and objects and plunged forward into pure abstraction.
“Carating would use non-traditional techniques in handling acrylic,” wrote Ruben D.F. Defeo in his monograph for Carating’s 2012 retrospective. “Like the gestural abstraction authored by Jackson Pollock, he would literally do away with brushes to apply pigment on canvas, squeeze them onto the canvas directly from the tube, or in a playful and very physical manner, throw paint at the canvas, allowing accidents to happen and actually splatter myriad shapes and forms, texturing the entire surface of the canvas.”
In a way, Carating was still making music. The physical way in which he attacked the canvas was like a performance, although this time it was more like jazz than opera. Without a libretto, he started with the germ of an idea, the barest outline of a concept, and improvised on that theme with a predetermined palette, allowing instinct and the internal logic of the painting itself to determine the outcome.
“The music is still there on the canvas,” he says, describing his method. “Instead of notes, I play with line, color and texture.”
“It’s like singing and dancing at the same time,” he adds. “I work fast. It’s almost automatic. It takes me longer to prepare my paints and contemplate the composition than to execute the painting. The execution is very very fast. I paint alla prima, wet on wet, the layers of colors blend into each other. You can’t stop and go back. It becomes more rational toward the end, when you try to balance the elements and decide how to end the painting.”
Carating favors large canvases—4’ x 5’, 5’ x 5’, sometimes even larger—where he can give free rein to the act of painting.
“I feel restricted by a smaller canvas,” he says. “I like to let loose. I’m very impatient. When I start a painting in the morning, I want to finish it.”
Now 71, Carating hasn’t slackened his pace.
“I paint everyday,” he says. “As long as I have the materials to paint.”
To keep up with the physical demands of his art, he lifts weights.
He has carpenters on call to keep him supplied with canvases, and routinely buys up all the acrylic paint from the local art supply stores. These days, he orders paint by box from Amazon so he can have a reliable supply.
He starts work at 7 in the morning, and finishes by 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Then he drives to Loyola Memorial Park to visit the graves of his parents, a daily routine he has followed for the last 10 years since his mother’s death.
He still enjoys music.
Norberto Carating’s “Moonlight Sonata,” presented by the Hiraya Gallery, runs until March 23, at the Mezzanine Level of Makati Shangri-La Hotel.
