Julie Lluch’s City in Terra Cotta

On a Sunday morning the sculptor Julie Lluch would ordinarily be at church service, but this morning she is entertaining two visitors, friends from the past, reminiscing about old times and talking of the latest goings on about town, the ongoing projects in Lluch’s terra cotta city.

In her residence and temporary studio on Mayaman Street in UP Village, over glasses of cranberry juice on ice, Lluch is in the pleasant company of, aside from the two friends, a large cotta figure of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo whose centenary is celebrated this year, and two busts yet draped under protective cloth, which she says are of Betty Go Belmonte, waiting to be further dried under the sun and put through fire of kiln, before being cast in bronze.

We were only so high when Julie used to drop by the house with her ex husband Danny Dalena, what a pair they were, full of fire and brimstone and art in progress or waiting to happen, Julie usually behind the wheel of their Beetle, if it was a Beetle, Danny being unable to drive because he was deaf.

Until recently the clay figurines and sculptures of phallic cacti and gigantic ribbed condoms were in the annex of the old house, but when last we looked in the crumbling structure they were nowhere to be found, gone perhaps the way of transient gardeners, househelp, drivers who used the annex as living quarters, surrounded by books in brown paper covers, empty beer and wine bottles.

“That generation is no more,” Julie says now of the old men who were like her mentors, Franz Arcellana, Nick Joaquin, Xoce Garcia Villa. Franz of course graced her Metropolitan Museum show opening in the early ‘90s, and who, she says, paid her the highest compliment.

“That (winning the national artist award) won’t happen unless Julie does my bust,” she quotes Franz as saying, since she at the time had already done those of Joaquin and Villa.

Nick, on the other hand, was incredibly funny. “Lagi kaming niloloko no’n,” she says, recalling the time she asked Nick if it was okay if her students at St. Paul’s College interviewed him. After this class activity the students remarked how sad and hairy was Nick’s life, imagine, being left by his bride on the day of his wedding!

Now she is showing her visitors photos of past works, a gallery of terra cotta figures each with its own story: “Picasso and I” first exhibited at the Pinaglabanan Galleries in the mid-‘80s, featuring the harried housewife and fish burning in the frying pan and her daughter beside her while a cat ambles by, the whole tableaux now with Gilda Cordero Fernando’s collection along Panay Avenue with the tall trees and the fruit bats; then one of Gilda herself, fellow curly tops in an almost pensive mood, but not quite, not quite; of the art and chess patron Odette Alcantara, whose sculpture was the only survivor of the fire that gutted the original Heritage Art Gallery in Cubao, none the worse except for a lost finger, proving that clay’s birthing is much like the phoenix; a young Muslim woman who was the fifth wife of a warlord in Mindanao, who Julie thought had stood her up at an appointment concerning the commissioned work, only to later find out that the woman had been executed along with her bodyguard lover, with whose child she was reportedly pregnant; the parents of former congressman Butch Abad sitting at leisure on a terrace overlooking the breathtaking Batanes view; the tableaux like poster of collected works that advertised the documentary “Yuta” with filmmaker Jesumaria Sescon, resembling the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s; Barbara Gonzalez with cigarette and one exposed breast, which pose the subject herself suggested; “Nude before a mirror” with Tita de Quiros, bought by the Singapore museum which however might not know it is Tita; “Philippine Gothic”, again circa Pinaglabanan, a send-up of the American version, only this time we have Dalena and Lluch and an itchy dog between them, symbol and anatomy of a breakup; yes, it can go on and on.

But in the past years it has mostly been works commissioned by the city government, such as Mayor Arsenio Lacson reading a newspaper on a bench along Roxas Blvd.; Gen. Carlos P. Romulo at the corner of UN Avenue and the selfsame boulevard, not at all looking lost among the promenaders trooping to nearby Starbucks; MH del Pilar at whose unveiling was present another press pillar, Max Soliven; and Betty Go’s, commissioned by Mayor Sonny Belmonte, three busts of which will grace the school named after her, the MRT2 station that stops at her street, and at the lobby of this newspaper’s offices in Port Area, across the DVD pirates and above the racket of 16 wheelers.

“Yes, I’ve met her,” the artist says of Mrs. Belmonte. “In fact we are kumpares. We both stood as ninangs once.”

For the bust she used photos and her distinct memories of the subject. Lluch says there are advantages working with terra cotta, as there can still be room for correction and remedy, unlike say, wood or other less malleable medium.

Just the other week Julie was in her hometown of Iligan City to vote, the place not as much opposition country as it was in past years. Her ancestral house still stands, with her siblings keeping the home fires burning where her original studio stands, complete with stove large enough to accommodate human figures.

Soon enough her youngest daughter Kiri, who herself has an ongoing show in Magnet ABS-CBN light years away from being the little girl in Picasso and I, walks in and greets the interviewers. She briefs them on her exhibit of found clay with the help of a laptop, her face somewhat resembling her dad’s, but definitely prettier.

A bit later second daughter Aba arrives, and promptly takes photographs of mom and the visitors with a professional-looking camera, she’s another visual artist handy with terra cotta, and has already done a sculpture of the dachshund Liit.

The eldest Sari is in New York and just out of hospital due to intestinal complications. She is a filmmaker who did “Rigodon” with husband Keith, and together they made the first Dalena grandchild. Straight out of Pakil, not Compton.

Of course somewhere in Kamuning is the Beethoven patriarch, most likely painting as usual with Nini and James Bond close by, and his portraits of his Tres Marias are ever present in the living room in Mayaman.

And as Sunday morning segues into noon the guests must soon take their leave, with Betty Go still under wraps and Frida Kahlo just about done, and Julie escorts her visitors out to the driveway, but only up to the shade. But wait, one of them has forgotten a notebook so the sculptor runs back inside to get it, waving it at them and handing it back, on which is written the first draft of what you’re reading now, like a study ready to be dried under the sun of the terra cotta city.