Salvador Cabrera Sold at Auction Prices

Salvador Cabrera - In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Salvador Cabrera could finish as many as ten paintings a day, which led to his being jokingly referred to as a "quick draw" artist. But his works never betrayed the speed with which he produced them, each one coming out as a thoughtful depiction of familiar scenes.

His renditions of children at play, portraits of mother and child and other slices of everyday life were made distinctive by the wide eyes of his subjects. This trademark may have been atypically Filipino, but Cabrera made sure he infused his paintings with local flavour and colour, showing youngsters flying kites and engaged in other native games or swathing them in clothes that could only be Pinoy. But it was the soulful gaze of those gaping eyes that would be the most endearing trait of his paintings.

Among today’s generation, only a few would probably know that the late Salvador Cabrera once gained an earnest following for those works and in later years. Salvador, by accounts, never had a struggling-artist phase as he managed to build a clientele that patronized his works. During his most productive years, he could finish as many as five portraits a day, and each one would go for P500, a hefty amount in those days. His long-running success afforded him and his family practically all the luxuries in life.
"He lived by the day. It was the bohemian ideal," Bencab says of his brother. "He was a real artist. For him, art was his life. He pursued that career. He had a regular job, but he was also painting."

Unfortunately, Salvador Cabrera’s career seemed to flounder in his later years. In the crisis decade of the 1980s, the tourists dwindled and so did the patrons of his art. With his health failing, Salvador relied on the help of his brother Ben, who by then was an established artist. Bencab says that his brother ended up being exploited by dealers, with his watercolors being sold at a measly P100 per piece. But, Bencab points out that the ever industrious Salvador would still manage to make as many as ten artworks a day. After all, this was something he loved doing.