The story behind Hapag ng Pagasa - Last Supper, Phil version

[claRkEnt]

I searched the forum and found nothing about the subject. Worth sharing and discussing...

The story behind Hapag ng Pagasa
FUNFARE By Ricardo F. Lo
Friday, November 2, 2007



It turned out that I was among the last to know.

By the time my friend Raoul Tidalgo and I saw Hapag ng Pagasa hanging on a wall at the souvenir store of the Sto. Niño Shrine in Cebu City last summer, we would learn that priests had been extolling it in their sermons and several had hung framed copies of it in their own dining rooms, the better to remind every member of the family — and house guests as well — not to leave a crumb on the plate because out there, without their knowing it, or beyond the fence of every well-provided-for home, are hungry souls with not a bite to eat.

Done in oil on a 48 x 96 canvas by an artist named Joey Velasco, Hapag ng Pagasa is a variation — I should say, a very relevant, modern-day version — of The Last Supper, with street children in dirty clothes sharing a meal with Jesus, instead of the usual 12 apostles we’ve all been accustomed to seeing. At the extreme left of the wooden, makeshift table sits a boy looking away from Jesus, holding a bag he must have snatched from somebody, instead of Judas clutching a bag with 30 pieces of silver.

Moved by the sad and empty faces of the children in the painting, with our conscience pricked, Raoul and I watched Hapag ng Pagasa nearly teary-eyed with mounting curiosity, noting how Jesus appears so comfortable and so at-home with his table-mates, engrossed in breaking what looks like a pizza pie.

There and then, I bought 10 pieces of the painting and, as soon as I got back to Manila, had them framed, hung one at the office and gave the rest away to members of my family and dear friends, among them Ethel Ramos and Ronald Constantino who would tell me that for several days, the painting seemed to haunt him. “I felt a bit depressed and I couldn’t eat,” said Ronald who found something “disquieting” in what the artist Velasco called Table of Hope.

The one who touched me the most is the little boy bent over under the table, sharing what could be crumbs with a (presumably stray) cat, looking so emaciated and no better than a rat devouring a piece of stolen cheese.

I wondered, who could these children be? Did artist Velasco paint them from imagination? Are they fictitious faces plucked from random memory and gathered like a one-for-all/all-for-one barkada? Or are these children real, moving in our midst, roaming the streets with nowhere to go, no warm beds to lay their weary bodies in?

The children are real after all, all 12 of them. One is dead and the rest are alive but not too well, living in cramped spaces under the bridge which they call “home,” scavenging the trash in Payatas, snatching a bag from a rich-looking passer-by, selling sampaguita while dripping wet in the rain, knocking on car windows for some coins, molested at the tender age of 13 by a drug-addicted neighbor, maltreated by jobless parents. Jesus, I’m sure, is in every one of those children whom Joey calls by fictitious names in the book. You see, even the down-trodden have a privacy to protect.

Joey found what I want to describe as “children of a lesser god” (title of a Hollywood movie) in depressed places in Metro Manila, including a cemetery, photographed them and then painted them into what passes for a foster family, sharing a measly meal.

for full article :
http://www.philstar.com/index.php?En...&type=2&sec=31

.

[claRkEnt]

really made me curious so i looked for the youtube video/documentary mentioned in the article... sharing it as well...

edit: it seems that embedding is prevented/disabled... watch the video in youtube site instead
.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_4aCrrbCIg"]YouTube - Probe - Joey Velasco[/ame]

[silver streak]

indeed, poverty is around us...true sharing would be one virtue that the painting would remind us...
...but then there is something to this: "...teach a person how to fish and he lives..."

[Horsepower]

Kambas ng Lipunan

The kids' stories.