Romulo Olazo: A life for Art

BY ALICE G. GUILLERMO

Excerpts from the book Romulo Olazo

Today, he is a paragon of an artist, if there indeed is one, because of his constant reaching out towards perfection, not leaving any detail, technique, and medium by the wayside, and leaving nothing to weakness and chance.

Olazo has a well-rounded artistic personality: he has a side that also clamored for expression, and that was his figurative side. Thus, Olazo is an artist who balanced two sides: the abstract and the figurative.

On Landscapes
Many of Olazo’s landscapes are not just expressive renditions of trees in space or in a field, but they possess a strong element of atmosphere that binds the elements together.

On the Mother and Child works
But in this subject, Olazo has worked in a wide gamut of resources, such as acrylic on paper, charcoal, oil on board, oil on canvas, oil pastel, pastel, and watercolor. The artist is keenly aware of how the medium affects the expressive content of the work.

On the Nudes
His nudes are among the most sincere and honest representations of the human body by an artist.

On Paper works
It is not to be overlooked that one of Olazo’s lasting contributions was his introduction of handmade paper in local printmaking, thus creating a healthy vogue in the use of the material culled from indigenous materials with their fascinating textures and materials, their charming deckle edges, so different from the machine-made.

On Pinwheels
But this was a game Olazo used to play with his father who constructed these colorful whirligigs to catch the now expanding, now contracting rays of the sun.

The Diaphanous Series
What distinguishes Olazo’s Diaphanous paintings from all other abstract works in the country and even elsewhere is the viewer’s immediate reception which is a mixture of awe verging on a sense of solemnity.

Permutations
What is essential here is that Olazo added the dimension of actual visual depth to the layers of transparencies that now interacted with each other not only in relative sizes and textures in terms of horizontal layers but also vertical ones as well.