USC Press to Launch Coffee Table Book on Iconic Painter Martino A. Abellana

USC Press will launch Kamingaw: An Impressionist Portrait of the Bisaya Painter Martino A. Abellana on January 10, 2017, Tuesday, from six to nine in the evening, at the Capiz Ballroom, Cebu Country Club, Cebu City.

Written by Raymund L. Fernandez, Kamingaw limns the life and times, the art and influence of Martino Abellana (1914–1988). Professor Raymund L. Fernandez, as skilled with the pen as he is with the brush, captures in Kamingaw the essential Abellana.

The book is a portrait of an artist fondly called “Noy Tinong,” a Carcaranon whose initial artistry would be honed by creative collaboration with members of his talented family, and whose evolving aesthetic would take shape under the mentoring of masters like Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino. Winning national awards in the ’50s, the figurative impressionist would practice his craft until the late ’80s, producing an impressive body of work that includes portraits, landscapes, and still life rendered in oil, charcoal, and pastels.

Kamingaw is both a comprehensive exposition of Abellana’s works and a fitting tribute to the legend who paved the way for the development of Cebuano art. Together with his friend Professor Julian Jumalon, he helped found the Fine Arts program at the University of the Philippines College Cebu; there, the likes of Raymund Fernandez, Celso Pepito, and Mar Vidal – along with an entire generation of Cebuano painters – zealously learned from the “Amorsolo of the South.”