The Legacy of My Father, the Artist

I grew up in a 'regular' family - father, mother, elder sister, myself, younger sister. Mother took care of us kids, the home, and a small convenience store. Father always got home an hour after work hours and we all had supper together.

The daily routine was pretty much the same, except when Father worked overtime (which we always knew even though we did not have a telephone, when he did not come on time), and soon permanently disrupted when us kids grew up and started college.

At the time when minimum wage was Php 4.00 a day and Php 120.00 monthly, father was receiving Php 300.00 a month, thus we had our own house, a two-story wooden abode on a lot contracted to us for 10 years. When we had to transfer on two occasions, parts of the same house went with us and re-constructed, diminishing in size each time.

My earliest recollection of the artist in my father was when I looked with awed amazement as he applied small globs of paint on a huge canvass. This soon began to be gradually populated by images of helmeted and armored foreigners battling skimpily clothed bronze-skinned natives on seashore not far from huge ocean-going ships with billowing sails.

MATEO GERUNDIO BERONGA, popularly nicknamed Mac by friends and colleagues, was born 21 September 1911 in Cebu City. His inborn artistic talent was augmented by on-job exposure in various printing shops in and around the environs. He further enhanced this ability when he took up formal Art Courses in the International Correspondence Schools, one of his tutors the famed Norman Rockwell.

The Second World War had him join guerillas in the mountains south of Cebu province, and because of his light skin, usually as a decoy to ambush enemy convoys. A stern warning note wrapped around a bullet forced him to brave the open seas, bringing his wife and infant baby girl, on a boat with only a blanket for sail. Fortunately, they landed in Luzon in the province of Cavite in a place called Noveleta which the Japanese forces had not reached and occupied.

The Liberation brought even better luck, including two more kids. They moved to Manila where he was hired at the Philippine Aero Transport Corporation, the precursor of the national flag carrier Philippine Air Lines, first in the whole of Asia. He was an original pioneer and he stayed with the company for 30 years. This status and respect did not dim even when he became a labor leader (shop steward) and was laid-off work for more than one year when a strike was called and subsequently lost.

I was already graduated from Chemical Engineering, and gainfully employed myself, when I learned that my father, now retiring, had a previous family in Cebu in the period preceding the war.

Little by little, I came to be acquainted with them all: one brother and four sisters and their mother! I would sometimes even stay overnight or a few days with the individual families, especially when I was in between employments.

Father's sojourn in Manila prevented him from being a co-founder with close friend and famed lepidopterist/painter Julian Jumalon, of what was to be later named Cebu Art Association. Upon returning for good to Cebu, he took his palette again and resumed painting full time. Two of his paintings were commissioned by the city government and permanently displayed at the Rizal Museum, another was commissioned by the University of San Carlos and may be found at the Center for Cebuano Studies at the Main Campus, and still another in one of the offices in Ayala Holdings building.

My father's oil-on-canvass paintings, done in soft conservative style, reflect his many interests in various subjects: historical events, landscapes, everyday scenes, whimsical fantasy. He was planning to create a new masterpiece when he passed away peacefully in his sleep in the early morning of 26 June 1999, just three months short of his 88th birthday, exactly five-and-a-half years after the death of my mother. An exhibit organized by Kolor Sugbo, entitled Cebu Old Masters, posthumously recognized and reaffirmed his contribution to the Cebuano heritage.