CXLVI: Give Art on Christmas Day 2025

As a compartmentalized task-oriented person, I need to say that this year’s seasonal operations were largely continuations of past Christmases, building on lessons learned in previous years. For starters, the search for a Christmas card cover artwork started early, in fact as early as December 2024, when I contacted a potential artist whose work I had seen in a recent book anthology of Bulacan artists.

Though still relatively young, the artist was fairly well-established in the realist, even photorealist, genre. His growing portfolio, only some parts of which were included in the anthology, demonstrated respectable nods to the great renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

 

As with past Christmas artworks, I asked the artist for studies around the theme of “A Filipino Christmas,” and by February 2025, he had sent me three, namely,

“Airplane Gift”

“Friends Celebrating their First Parol”

“Parol Vendor”

After more than twenty years of commissioned Filipino Christmas artworks, it’s probably inevitable that subjects will start to recur.  Of the three studies, “Airplane Gift” and “Friends Celebrating their First Parol,” to my eyes and mind, reminded me the most of previous Christmas card covers, therefore I asked the artist to progress “Parol Vendor,” in particular. 

Over the March to April 2025 period, the artist diligently sent me updates of how the final artwork was taking shape.

By late April, the painting, while not yet completely finished, was already fairly discernible.

At the beginning of May, the piece had been finished and delivered, and it could then be professionally photographed.

Apart from an early search for a Christmas artist, which allowed the final artwork to be completed by mid-year, another favorable continuity from previous Christmases was the inclusion in our gift bag of the latest Kapitan Tambay collection, now volume 3.

This will allow recipients to check if their political and world views align with my family’s, or at least with the artist’s.

Another continuity, perhaps more predictable, was the 2026 edition of the Ortigas Foundation desk calendar, now featuring views of structures in pre-World War II Manila.

A good exercise for recipients will be to do some desk research to undertake an inventory of which of the twelve places shown still exist, or had been heavily modified or rebuilt due to war damage, or have, sadly, disappeared.

The sole discontinuity this year was the third bag content – the revised edition of “Isang Daang Bagay na Nais kong Isama sa Hukay” by Kyle Gianan, “The Filipino Picker,” the social media-savvy purveyor-dealer of antique and vintage objects and other collectibles.  

Kyle’s book is a faithful compendium of his range of interests and expertise (which differs from my family’s and mine, as his collections involve mainly small, handy objects, whereas ours are mostly large, human-sized, and bulky!). 

The final continuity, to contain all of the above, was the third annual incarnation of our katsa bag, now emblazoned with the logos of both our two house-museums in Malolos (previous versions had the logo of only one or the other).

Everything was accompanied by this year’s Christmas card, with the afore-cited finished artwork on the cover.

Sir-Anthony Y. Mercado

ANG MAGPAPAROL

Oil on canvas

114 cm x 91 cm (45 in x 36 in)

2025

A native of Apalit, Pampanga, Sir-Anthony “Tony” Y. Mercado graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Bulacan State University in Malolos, Bulacan in 2017.  Since then, he has been a finalist or semi-finalist in numerous art competitions, including the Shell National Art Competition, the DPC-PLDT Art Competition, and the Metrobank Art Competition.

A prolific artist in the realist style, Tony has exhibited frequently in solo exhibitions, including at the Ysobel Art Gallery in BGC Taguig in 2019, at the Village Art Gallery at the Alabang Town Center in 2021, in Art Verité in BGC Taguig in 2022, and in Art Cube in Makati in 2024.

Email: mercadosiranthony@gmail.com

Mobile: +63 995 933 8611

And so, from Tony Mercado, Kyle Gianan, Kapitan Tambay (a.k.a. Allan Leycano), and my family and me, 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon!

Originally published on 5 January 2026. All text and photos (except where attributed otherwise) copyright ©2025-2026 Leo D Cloma. The moral right of Leo D Cloma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

CXLV: GIVE ART ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2024

Today January 5th being the Feast of the Epiphany and the first day of the last week of the 2024 Christmas season (which ends with the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism on January 12th) seems as good a day as any to report back on our Christmas art endeavor for this year. The search for 2024’s Christmas artwork was eased somewhat with an unrelated commission the year before. In October 2023, I took delivery of an unusual mixed media composition depicting Malolos’ historic Casa Tribunal, which I had written about here a couple of times before:

https://akyat-bahay-gangster.blogspot.com/2012/01/xxvi-rare-opportunity-unique.html https://akyat-bahay-gangster.blogspot.com/2016/04/cii-save-malolos-casa-tribunal.html I came across a young Bulacan artist whom I thought created pretty detailed and accurate depictions of heritage structures, and I thought that the Casa Tribunal would be an excellent subject for this artist.

Right after last New Year’s Day, in early January 2024, I thought, why not ask this same artist to create our next Christmas artwork?  And so was hatched the idea of depicting, not another heritage structure, but a much newer building, still in Malolos – the chapel in our own neighborhood in Barangay Guinhawa.

Not surprisingly, the process of composing this piece was intricate and time-consuming, but by October, it was essentially complete.

It also became obvious how we managed to somehow re-imagine the Chapel as a Christmas setting.

The only details that remained to be addressed related to the placement of strings of lights on the façade,

and what color they should be,

both of which questions were resolved in the final artwork.

Another problem was the inability to find a suitable hovering Angel for the Nativity tableau – something like this:

Eventually, the artist decided that a Star of Bethlehem in the form of a Christmas lantern would be an acceptable substitute.

By All Souls’ Day, the piece was complete.

At around that same time, we had settled on the other components of our gift bag for the year, beginning with “Gabay sa Wastong Pamamahala ng Pera”, the Pilipino edition of the “Handbook on Personal Finance” written by the late Dean Ma. Elenita B. Cabrera of the Lyceum of the Philippines University and published by the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines in 2021.

A follow-up to last year’s favorite is also inside this year’s gift bag, the observant and irreverent (but with a lot of heart) Kapitan Tambay Book 2.

After so many years, the annual gift bag would no longer be complete without the mainstay desk calendar from the Ortigas Foundation, this year featuring engravings from the “El Oriente” Manila weekly beginning 1875.

The only thing left to do was encase everything in a katsa bag, which worked quite well last year, therefore we’ll do the same this year but affix the logo of another of our Malolos house-museums to it instead.

At this point, we formally introduce this year’s Christmas artist.

Born in 1985, Angelo Hernandez Agustin is a self-taught artist from Plaridel, Bulacan.  After graduating from the Centro Escolar University in Malolos in 2006 with a degree in Business Administration, he joined the family’s food manufacturing business; in 2018, he took overall responsibility for its operations.  It was shortly after then that he started dabbling in art production in his spare time, having been encouraged by his family, colleagues, and friends to pursue it alongside the management of the business.  He sold his first artwork in 2022.

His refined and delicate artworks require comprehensive attention to detail as well as a lengthy creation process, and are characterized by the combination of diverse media and materials.  As an admirer of art and history, he specializes in mixed media miniature sculptures of heritage structures. Through his works, he aims to bridge the gap between the eras of old and modern architecture to give today’s generation a glimpse of the rich culture of the Philippines.

His latest artwork, “Paskong Ma-Guinhawa”, while featuring a relatively younger structure than his usual subjects, the (just-a-decade-old) Chapel of Our Lady of Remedies in Barangay Guinhawa, Malolos, Bulacan, perfectly demonstrates the ability of Angelo’s art to blend tradition and modernity while depicting that most evocative of Filipino seasons – Christmas.

On Facebook: Angelo Hernandez Agustin ARTS   

Via Email: agustin_18_061@yahoo.com

Angelo H. Agustin

PASKONG MA-GUINHAWA

Mixed Media

24” x 36”  / 61 cm x 91 cm

2024

And so from my family and me,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon!

Originally published on 5 January 2025.  All text and photos (except where attributed otherwise) copyright ©2025 Leo D Cloma.  The moral right of Leo D Cloma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.