The older I get, the less I’m inclined to leave the house, unless it’s for some exotic destination like Paris, Penang, and my poker club. This former pub crawler now prefers Coke and dalandan juice to pinot noir and San Mig Light; next to Beng (and our dear, departed Chippy, when he was around), what I now look most forward to seeing when I get home is my La-Z-Boy. I turn on my iMac for surfing, my TV for news and entertainment, and my laptop for work, and I feel that everything I need is a keystroke or a remote control button away. Luxury means oversleeping and a weekly foot massage. I don’t even like — and, as much as possible, I don’t take —phone calls, especially from strangers; if you want my attention and a quick and well thought-out response, please text or e-mail me.
Not surprisingly, my circle of true friends has diminished to the diameter and depth of a thimble, which is perfectly fine by me, in an age when others can boast of 30,000 “friends” on Facebook. Friends to me are real people I’ve broken bread, fixed a flat, slaved on a job, drank a toast, shared a toke, and done more outrageous things with. If they’re still around and I see them once in five years, no problem; if they’ve passed on to another life or another sphere of interest, then I’m happy with my memories of them, just as I hope they’ll remember me with fondness.
But now and then I get nudged out of my sweet stupor by Beng, who keeps in touch with the world by looking up her Facebook page as soon as she gets up in the morning. And so it was that Beng urged me last week to emerge from my burrow and accompany her to the opening of an art exhibit last Saturday; as usual, I moaned and groaned, but as it was Beng’s birthday that Sunday and I had yet to find her a birthday gift, I thought that I better say yes. “Who’s the artist?” I asked Beng. “Junyee,” she said. Hmmm, I thought — Junyee’s always interesting (the person and the work), and besides I knew him to be a very good friend of Beng’s, so I said, “OK.”
And I’m glad I did, because the afternoon we spent at Junyee’s ongoing show, “Dark Matter” (June 2-July 28, Gallerie Duemila, 210 Loring Street, Pasay City), turned out to be one of the most enjoyable excursions I’ve made these past few months. It took a while to find the gallery, tucked away in the recesses of old Pasay, but once past the gate a wealth of wonders opened up — in the art on the walls, and in the people watching them.
Junyee himself came out to greet us; born Luis Yee Jr. in Cabadbaran, Agusan del Norte, Junyee is at once a painter, sculptor, installation artist, cartoonist, furniture designer, and landscaper. He just turned 70, but you wouldn’t guess it from the twinkle in his eye. Junyee’s the kind of artist who gets a kick out of turning the world — or himself — upside down. In this show, he did just that, working on his back to create intricate patterns on a board with soot from a handheld gas lamp — a deliberate anachronism in this digital age, but quintessentially Junyee. The works he produced are, in the nature of soot, dark, but flecked with brilliance, and it’s this counterpoint that fascinates, that elevates Junyee from the easy morbidity and cynicism of too many young artists today.
What I also enjoyed about the opening was meeting a host of old friends from the early ’70s, a time in my life when — just like Junyee’s soot paintings — it was the light of art that relieved the darkness of martial law. I had been imprisoned as an activist for seven months in 1973, during which, to relieve the boredom and learn something new, I joined an artists’ group led and taught by the printmaker Orly Castillo. Upon my release, and with no other job in sight, I entered the studio of the Printmakers Association of the Philippines on Jorge Bocobo St. in Ermita, learned printmaking, and befriended a score of artists infinitely more talented than this interloper (among them, a pretty girl named June, who later became Mrs. Dalisay), and it was a joy to meet them again that Saturday: Fil de la Cruz, Benjie Cabrera, Jess Flores, and Tiny Nuyda, among others. Other friends like artist-singer Heber Bartolome and curator Willy Marbella contributed to the cheer.
I also had a pleasant chat with another friend, the sculptor Julie Lluch, who enthusiastically reported on her ongoing love affair — with wood, a medium she’s never really worked with before, having devoted herself to terracotta all her life. A native of Iligan, she had been much moved by the Sendong disaster which hit the area hard, leaving tons of logs torn off the mountainsides and carried downstream by rampaging floodwaters. Turning tragedy into triumph, Julie has worked with some of that wood to celebrate it as both material and subject — a challenge that Julie’s daughter Kiri, herself an artist, has also taken up.
(Yet another friend I ran into at Junyee’s show was the environmental advocate Tony Oposa, whose Road Rev movement is beginning to make waves, but I’ll write about that in another installment.)
Listening to these artists — whom we writers embrace as kindred spirits — I remembered that seclusion and solitude may indeed be requisite to the art-making process; but once the work is finished, it is nothing if not shared, and an artist in the company of others can be sharing at its lively best.
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Speaking of old friends, June 24 will mark the 10th death anniversary of the much-loved food critic and cultural historian Doreen Fernandez, and The Museum at De La Salle University will be mounting an exhibit in her honor from June 21 to Aug. 24, opening on the 21st a 5 pm. Titled “Food for Thought: A Celebration of Good Taste,” the exhibit will feature her literary works, images of food, and other material reflective of the notion of good taste.
I remember Doreen for some very special reasons. We worked together as editorial consultants for the massive, 10-volume Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People (Readers Digest, 1998), a Centennial project that brought together many of our finest historical scholars, writers, and artists. Doreen brought her class, her charm, and her composure to the project — and, as a side benefit, we never lacked for suggestions about where to go and what to have for lunch.
Because of her long battle with illness, Doreen also asked me to take over her creative writing class at the Ateneo for a couple of weeks, a service I was glad to perform, never having taught there before and curious about what the students would be like. As it turned out, they included the likes of Clinton Palanca and Apa Ongpin, who were then in what might be called their literary adolescence, so it was well worth the experience.
But what reminds me most of Doreen, anniversary or not, is something she bequeathed to me long before she passed away: a few of her fountain pens—a Parker, a Sheaffer, and a Montblanc — which remain among the most prized in my collection, alongside those of other writers such as the National Artists Franz Arcellena and NVM Gonzalez and poet Jimmy Abad. Long before computers, these were the pens that produced the stories, the essays, and the poems that we now count among our classics. I take them out of storage now and then and hold them in my hand, imagining the moment when they touched paper and wrote indelible literature.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.