From Banahaw to Sagada, Jaime de Guzman enchanted with his paintings

The greatest painting I ever saw in my youth showed sinewy men reaching for the starry sky, the land beneath them rivers of lantern-lit colors. They wielded outstretched nets hoping to catch fireball-like birds riding the wind.

It was a vigorous tableau of action taken from real life by the painter Jaime de Guzman, who depicted what his neighbors in Sagada did at certain times of the year. It was a great painting to me not because of technique, since I’m no art critic, but because it spoke to me memorably at a certain time of my life.

I met Jaime in Sagada soon after I graduated from college, relishing the new freedom from school but tormented by the uncertainty of what was next. This was 1984, when cities were rocked by protests and an insurgency was spreading in the countryside. I was wondering what kind of life I could lead. I saw one version in Sagada.

Jaime had been living with his wife Anne and their seven kids in Sagada as artists and potters, drawn by the area’s abundant clay as well as a community rooted in breathtaking landscapes and robust traditions. I would visit them repeatedly through the years, inspired by the example of worldly lowlanders migrating to otherworldly highlands.

War would come to Sagada by way of a firefight in the center of town, traumatizing the community. The de Guzmans would move out of Sagada and down to the town of Candelaria, Quezon, in the shadow of Mount Banahaw where Jaime would establish a makeshift studio in a hut next to a small lake called Dalagan.

I’d visit him there for days at a time, where he had embedded himself in a different kind of upland community, mostly migrants tilling recently cleared slopes.

When he wasn’t painting, he was riding his horse over Banahaw’s rolling terrain. I took a photo once of his horse suddenly rising on its hind legs as Jaime was bathing it in Dalagan, a picture that he would turn into a painting. Like the bird-fishing in Sagada, it was a dramatic, life-affirming image I can easily recall, set against flowing shades of green.

I would learn later that wasn’t always his style. As a young painter, he was angrier and more morose, his art rife with images of death and suffering mostly in red and black.

I had met him in a mellower stage of his artistic life, a family man in tune with his natural environment, ruggedly at home in both Sagada and Banahaw.

I’m in two photographs with him, bookends of our decades-long friendship. The first was taken in a dap-ay, or an outdoor traditional circular meeting place made of stone in Sagada where elders would discuss the affairs of the community, often as tapuy (home-made rice wine) was passed around to add to the warmth of the fireplace in the center.

His piercing eyes peering over his hand on his face, Jaime is listening intently to my friend, the teacher Mike Gomez. To my left is the late Wilson Cadiogan, a Sagada native who went to university and eventually came back as a highly literate tambay and friend to all. I’m in the back, perhaps just half listening while looking off into the distance, probably processing the strangeness that I was encountering during that early trip to the highlands, when nearly everyone I hung out with was older than me.

The second picture is with Jaime in his wheelchair at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2015 on the opening night of a large retrospective exhibit of his work going back to the 1960s. It was a fitting victory lap for a major artist of our time.

Among his featured pieces was what had enchanted me many years before, the image of men on a mountaintop fishing for birds on a glimmering night. That painting’s unmistakable message to me in my anxious early 20s: reach for the sky and you never know what you’ll catch.

Jaime de Guzman died of natural causes last February 25, 2023 at the age of 80.