Lamberte, Rico A.

Art Appreciation
BSA 1-1 Prof. Jesus Emmanuel Villafuerte

Tinikling- tool of Amorsolo

Art is the expression of one’s feelings through creating something out of their imagination.
Art can be an artwork, sculpture, film, and even music. Philippines is one of the countries in the
world that has great history or art and artist. Fernando Amorsolo is one of them. When I visited
the National Museum, I saw his masterpieces. Those paintings, portraits, landscape and even
sketches are awesome. He was a portraitists and painter of rural Philippine landscapes. He is
properly known for his craftsmanship and mastery in the use of light. Amorsolo’s one famous
artwork is “tinikling” that was painted in the year 1946. This paper will mainly talk about the
content and meaning behind tinikling, aesthetic approach of this artwork, and my own analysis
and its notion of nationalistic approach.

In the year 1946, Amorsolo integrated the chiaroscuro style of Renaissance art into the soul
of Filipino traditional culture and history through painting. The painting contains an image of
joyful people dancing the Filipino folk dance which is tinikling. It was the dance that involves two
people beating, tapping and sliding bamboo poles on the ground against each other in coordination
with one or more dancers who step over and in between the poles in a dance. I also seen something
related to farming like; crops, vegetables, carabao, and dayami. People playing guitar and bamboo
instrument can also be seen in the painting. Men and women are wearing salakot which is the
primary hat used by Filipino farmers. The artwork is in the afternoon setting because it has sunny
theme where the sky is blue and has white clouds. Another thing that I saw in the painting is the
small church located on the top middle part. Amorsolo painted tinikling to introduce the identity
of Filipinos by nurturing a sense of nationhood. This artwork has successfully added artful
celebration to cultures, traditions, and Filipino ideals. Crops and vegetables in the painting depicts
the main type of job of Filipinos since Philippines is an agricultural country. My interpretation on
the appearance of the church is to depict the religion of the Filipinos which is Catholicism. There
is also an idea of music that time showing men playing guitar and bamboo instrument and the best
example for here is the Filipino kundiman. Tinikling has something to do with aesthetics- the
philosophy of art. Its beauty is culturally and historically situated and shaped by the social
condition of a particular time and space. Based on what I saw; it depicts a historical situation of
people in earlier times where their primary religion is Catholicism which were rooted from Spanish
colonization. It is also culturally situated because Amorsolo used people wearing traditional
clothes as his subject on the painting. He intimately familiar with impressionist techniques of light
and shadow. I saw a lot of those techniques waning in some of his artworks and painting in the
National Museum. In tinikling, there is also significant aspect of traditional art that symbolize
simple life during earlier times in the Philippines. It conveyed cultural values just like getting
socially related through dancing tinikling. This idea is essential to the notion of contemporary
aesthetics by Alice Guillermo. Amorsolo created a number of paintings about Tinikling dancing,
a folk dance style he was familiar with in the Philippines. I think the meaning is in the subject and
technique of his paintings. There are very few classical folk dancing paintings, and of those a great
many are of dancers who are statically posing or at rest, almost as if the painter is ceding the
depiction of motion to the dance itself and feels that the most pictorial drama is in the dancer
outside the dance. With Amorsolo’s work, however, we can get a sense of motion as well as of
place. He was intimately familiar with impressionist techniques of lighting and shadow and we
can see a lot of that also in the waning light in some of his paintings. The examples are; “the
marriage procession”, “rice harvesting”, and “the cock fighters”. He was among the first painters
to recognize the different face shapes necessary to depict different people, noting that European
faces not only appear more oval but also feel that way. His Philippine faces feel rounder. Also of
note, aside from the frivolity of the dancers in the subject of the painting, there is usually someone
off to the side engaged in the business of being alive: a fisherman loading his boat, a woman
carrying a jug on her head. Implying that for all its party atmosphere, this is an all-to-brief moment
in time when people can let it all hang out before the inevitable return to the drudgery of daily rural
life. The tinikling painting of Amorsolo give me the idea to connect it with his other painting
similar to it. This artwork’s name is “Antipolo Fiesta” that Amorsolo painted in 1947. Both
subjects are similar. Like in tinikling, Antipolo fiesta shows Philippine Fiesta where Filipino
people gathered to celebrate bountiful harvest. It is an oil painting made by Fernando Amorsolo
The oil painting on canvas depicts a rural scene where a group of people are shown celebrating a
fiesta in Antipolo. The main focus is on a pair of dancers in the field surrounded by revelers both
young and old. Abundant food is presented in basketfuls of assorted fruits on the benches and on
the ground, as well as the traditional roasted pig or lechon being prepared by two men. Nearby is
a house with huge windows from where dwellers watch the revelers. At the background is a huge
church, a symbolic town structure. A vast number of townsmen completes the essence of a fiesta.
Lamberte, Rico A. Art Appreciation
BSA 1-1 Prof. Jesus Emmanuel Villafuerte

To sum up, Amorsolo's portrayals on his countryside artworks can be regard as "the true
reflections of the Filipino Soul.” It gives identity to our nation. Nationalism is most closely
associated with artists, especially visual artists. This is partly because nationalism is also a type of
culture, but mainly because the abstraction of its main concepts nation, homeland, autonomy,
unity, identity, authenticity requires concrete “realization.” Visual artists have been attracted to
nationalism insofar as its concepts demand an individual and expressive response; conversely,
nationalist movements often require potent and stirring imagery, which can mobilize the people.
The artwork “tinikling” is a great treasure from our history because it gave emphasis to our distinct
culture and identity.
Tinikling – Fernando Amorsolo, 1946