“My family is a matriarchy and my lola [grandmother] is the matriarch, the ‘priestess,’ the true personification of the strong woman. She is so hard working, so tough, and yet so feminine,” says Cristina of the person who created her family’s colourful world. “It’s a rich legacy she has given our family, very difficult to emulate. It is, of course, hard to also keep up with her rhythm!”

Carmen and Cristina had each just finished their respective exhibitions: The Bejewelled Cosmos for Cristina in February 2016 at the Ayala Museum and In a New Light for Carmen in March 2016 at the Altromondo Gallery. Now, Carmen is getting ready to go home to Spain to her daughter and sisters. Cristina, however, wants to stay here longer to paint some more, as well as go full blast with her other passion: making accessories. Even so, there will soon be a group exhibition of this dynasty of artists (including Sylvia this time) titled Three Generations, scheduled at Novotel in January 2017.

Creativity runs wild in Betsy’s brood. Isabel is a former actress; Sylvia, another painter; Carmen, all of the above (painting, sculpting, acting). The next generation is equally creative. Apart from painting and accessories-making, Cristina also writes. Her sister Inez is in fashion design and her cousin Paula, photography. Queen Bee Betsy, on the other hand, has been painting all her life … with the exception of a quiet period one can attribute to love.

MAN FROM MANILA

Betsy was 21 when she met and married Antonio “Tony” Brias, an executive with the San Miguel Corporation who was regularly going to Madrid for medical reasons. She recalls the afternoon they met, when she reluctantly accepted the incessant invitation of an ardent suitor to go to the theatre. She did not even fix her hair properly and just covered her head with a pretty bandana.

The theatre and a drink were all Betsy was willing to indulge her suitor with; soon after, she asked him to take her home, knowing that he would still have to find a cab. Her suitor, however, spotted Tony and said, “Oye! There’s Tony Brias over there! He has a car and he can take us.” Betsy made some protestations which fell on deaf ears so she was introduced to this mysterious man from Manila. The suitor then asked Tony when he was leaving for Manila. And Betsy remembers the moment so vividly until today: “He looked at me and said, ‘Now, it depends.’” This instant attraction was not lost on the suitor who immediately told Tony about Betsy’s sister. “And I was so scared,” Betsy says. “He might like my sister more than me!” This did not happen. Instead, and in spite of her parents’ objections, Betsy married Tony in Spain a few months after.

The marriage naturally brought Betsy to Manila, and she loved the people who filled her new world—her new family, her new friends, everyone. The only disappointment was that she had to stop painting. “For many years I did not paint. He needed a lot of attention and I think he was a little jealous of my painting,” she says.

One day, Betsy was having breakfast with some women in the house of the tycoon Enrique Zobel. She was seated beside a beautiful brunette, a Peruvian woman named Mariana Parsons. “I was so drawn to her beauty that I found myself asking her, ‘Would you like to sit for me?’ She said yes, and this was followed by a deluge of requests for portraitures from her friends as well. Betsy painted when Tony was at work. “When he was about to arrive, I would tell my client, ‘We are through for the day,’” Betsy says.

If Tony noticed works in progress in Betsy’s private studio, he elected to ignore it. Betsy thinks his friends’ comments had a lot to do with what she took as a silent approval. “They would all say, ‘Tony, you have no right to take away from Betsy what she likes to do,” she relates.

PALETTE IN PROGRESS

Her art began with portraits, the first one being that of her sister which Betsy did at 13 years old. She had no formal lessons in portraiture but this artist believes that making portraits is an innate talent. “You cannot learn how to make portraits. You are either born with it or not—it is like having an ear for music,” she says emphatically. In the same breath she believes a good portrait artist may not necessarily be a good painter, and vice versa.

Of all the parts of the face, Betsy says she finds the mouth most difficult to copy, quoting the American artist John Singer Sargent who said: “A portrait is a picture in which there is something not quite right about the mouth.” It is so tiring for her to do the mouth that when she gets to this part, she makes sure she starts in the morning when she is still fresh and energised. She also agrees that she needs to know something about the person she is painting but adds that this discovery happens when her subject is sitting for her. In fact, most of her lasting friendships began when her friends sat for a portrait.

From portraits, she turned to flowers, starting with a bunch of carnations someone gave her mother. “Oh, she thought it was a masterpiece, and framed it!” Betsy recalls. Landscapes then followed and today, her brush takes her everywhere, from the sea to the sky, to the earth and its bounties. These days she has taken to painting clouds, for a very practical reason. “This is what I see when I look out the window or go out into the balcony in this condominium,” she says.

Her children and her children’s children bask in this world of colours as well.

PAINTED LIVES

Like her sisters, Carmen was born and raised in the Philippines. Though they would go back and forth to Spain often with their parents throughout the year, her mother’s home country remained merely a holiday destination—until her father died in 1976. Then they all moved to Madrid for good, more or less, except for Betsy who still had to spend most of her time in Manila for work. At that time, Betsy was a sought-after portraitist of the Philippines’ high society.

Her mother’s influence is strong in Carmen, who took up painting as well. But she also got a bit of her father’s love for drawing and for sculpture, which he collected. “It seems my heart likes different things,” she tries to explain why she dabbles in many art forms. As a young adult, when she would come back to visit the Philippines, she would also join the theatre group Repertory Philippines. And now she seems to be setting her eyes on the art of restoration, which she studied in Spain.

Betsy is very much aware of Carmen’s quandary. “She wants to be so many things. When she talks to somebody who flies a kite, she wants to fly a kite!” the mother remarks. And yet, she can see Carmen’s strengths where perhaps the daughter can’t. “I like the way that none of her paintings repeat; they are all different subjects,” the mother, or the artist, gives her critique.

Although Betsy taught art in Madrid once upon a time, neither Carmen nor Cristina had the benefit of her tutelage. But she will drop a comment now and then, enough to serve as a guide to both these women’s art.

For instance, on Cristina’s works, Betsy says, “She has changed a lot; I am surprised. Two of her recent paintings I think are absolutely fantastic. It is like there is a big gap between her works then and now. It is all very exciting. And I think the best painting from Cristina is yet to come.”

The young lady has also been painting ever since she can remember, being surrounded by artists—from her grandmother to her mother and to her aunts. Like Carmen, she also went into a period of searching. Leaving Spain to join her father in Chile, Cristina studied journalism and worked for a style magazine. That career failed (she hated her job) and felt she was left with no options. “As a journalism graduate I could be a teacher but I also did not want to do that!” she says.

She considered studying industrial design because she wanted to disprove the notion that art has no function. She was accepted at Pratt University in New York but could not get a scholarship. When that path closed again, Cristina went into a personal crisis. “I felt old and that I wasted so much of my life!” she says. She was 27 then.

“I was in pain so for many, many months, all I did was paint, paint, paint!” she says. She finished La Sirena de Puerto Galera which she showed in her first group exhibition in 2010 in Santiago. She had found herself again.

But youth has boundless energy and just one path does not seem enough for Cristina, for now. She also creates unique accessories, which she sells on-line. How she got into this is a favourite story she does not tire in telling. “I was five, I think, and in kindergarten,” she starts. “I did not like the apron they were making me wear in school so my mother sewed a string of glass crystals inside it, unseen by everyone. Only she and I knew about the stones. That, to me, was magical, and one of my first memories of jewellery.”

In this three-bedroom affair, the women occupy their private spaces. Even their workspaces are clearly delineated: Betsy’s in the dining room, Carmen’s in the balcony, and Cristina in her room at the end of the hallway.

All over the unit, however, in every nook and cranny, are canvases and canvases showing the works of these three women—from Cristina’s cosmos to Carmen’s multi-varied subjects to Betsy’s art that both stuns and soothes. It is a world of beauty, colour, and art—and a wonderful world of women, the Westendorp women.