{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60857,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"146","artist":"Betsy Westendorp (1927 - 2022)","title":"Painting #956-97 (Sunrise)","starting_price":600000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1997 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"39\" x 51 1/2\" (99 cm x 131 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Galleria Duemila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Betsy Westendorp’s atmosferografias (meaning ‘paintings of the atmosphere’), like her floral pieces, echo the mysticism and wonder found inherent in nature. She aims not only to revel in the beauty of the skies but to investigate light itself — its radiance, luster, and luminance. In that sense, Betsy revels in the ideals of Romanticism, ignoring the science of meteorology and instead celebrating the spirit of imagination unopposed.
It was the Spanish art critic and one of Betsy’s dear friends, Elena Flórez, who coined the term atmosferografias. “The manner she interprets it, the originality of the theme, and the absence of previous references moved me to search for the proper explanation so as to bring it to these pages with the purpose of delving into the matter,” she writes in a critique of Westendorp’s works.
After perusing several Spanish dictionaries from the 19th and the 20th centuries, she struck gold in a 1852 dictionary. There, written in the fourth meaning of the Spanish word for ‘atmosphere,’ were specific derivations from the word atmospherograph, meaning: description of the atmosphere and its qualities.
It is no surprise that Betsy found herself fascinated with the skies and their properties. The early 1950s saw Betsy and her husband, Tony, residing at the Ramona Apartment along Dakota Street (now M. Adriatico).
“At five o’clock, my husband, Tony, came home from San Miguel,” she said in a conversation with art critic Cid Reyes. “Their offices were near Malacañang, in Arlegui. He would pick me up and go to Manila Bay. Take a stroll...enjoy the view and the sunset.”
However, she only started painting the celestial atmosphere in the 1970s, two decades after she came to the Philippines as a young bride to a Filipino husband. Even after her husband’s death in 1976, Betsy’s atmosferografias continued, likely a visual eulogy for her dearly beloved’s metamorphosis from the physical world to the spiritual realm, transforming from the Manila Bay pieces to more metaphysical inquiries, with her works cutting through time and space in their quest for the sublime.
This 1997 Painting, #956-97, is among Betsy’s atmosferografia pieces, and in it, we can see her interrogation with light and radiance. By then, Betsy had had decades of seeing the best of Manila’s sunsets; yet her fascination was still unwavering. The theatrical tension of stillness and depth shines brightly through her composition.
“She brings out an infinite range of tones in the clustering clouds, each tint like an emotional revelation of her registry of mood,” Cid Reyes writes in Passages: Celebrating the Artistic Journeys of Betsy Westendorp. “A disciplined experimenter in optical alchemy, Betsy is capable of orchestrating an austere palette of deep dark red and a blaze of gold-tinged orange against the luxuriant masses of floating forms.”
Indeed, Betsy’s Atmosferografias, by turns real and ethereal, portrays the artist’s immense control over space, scale, material, and emotion, as well as her enchantment at the Pearl of the Orient’s mesmerizing sceneries, so much so that she had declined many a friend’s invasion to paint the Spanish sunset; for her, the Philippine sunset is truly incomparable. (Hannah Andrea Valiente)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":2800000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":2800000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":20007,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":3364480,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66872,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/146.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":67224,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/146b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":67223,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/146a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":145,"next":147,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}