Of all the visual artists I have encountered, there’s one whose mind and persona can’t but be described as unique and exquisite. Here she comes with her flowing ankle-length skirt with a black or sometimes white top, an interesting pair of clogs, and her trademark crowning glory—flowing, long, thick, curly black tresses. She has a patrician nose which she presumably must have inherited from what I independently gathered was a notable Lluch ancestry (Spanish historian, intellectual,l and Catalan patriot influenced by the Catalan Renaissance, Antoni Rubió i Lluch, 1856-1937; Spanish economist and politician Ernest Lluch, 1937-2000; and Spanish historian Rosa Lluch Bramon, just to name a few) but which she doesn’t claim, humble and self-deprecating as she has always been.
Julie Lluch & Author with- In the Fullness of Time sculptures
And when she opens her mouth or uses her pen to write (not to speak of her lifelong fascination with kneading, shaping, and sculpting clay), we can meet an artist who is cerebral and highly cultured. I first wrote about this eminent sculptor, Julie Lluch, when she exhibited in 2008 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) her Yuta: A Retrospective, which showcased an amazing array of terracotta artworks spanning 30 years of her personal, political, and spiritual life. And I wrote more pieces on her in her succeeding exhibits, like the one at the Tall Gallery of Finale Art File in 2016, In the Fullness of Time, describing and defining her philosophy and spiritual persuasion through a new medium: cast marble with acrylic pigment.
Four of the 15 or so artworks in the exhibit were major pieces grouped under the title “Kairos,” an ancient Greek word which means the right or opportune time. Her talented daughters served as models for the four pieces—Sari Dalena Sicat, multi-awarded film maker and UP faculty member; Aba Lluch Dalena, visual artist and teacher; and Kiri Dalena, visual artist and social realist film maker. For Lluch, the exhibit has given her happiness, not only because she enjoyed what she was doing but also because of the interaction and bonding she had with her daughters as they sat as her models.
Describing her art, Lluch said: “I have often declared, in the passion of youth, the inseparable Unity of Life and Art, put myself up as its walking manifesto in true bohemian fashion. In my autobiographical narratives, the identification between artwork and artist has become so complete as to make the work seem artless. Literally. I can point to my self-portrait and say, ‘That clay sculpture of a woman cutting onions is me and I am she. What makes us different is I am flesh and she is clay. But we are both real, and the stories that we tell are one and the same.’”
That unity of life and art found its way again to the Art Fair Philippines in February 2020, just before the pandemic lockdown, when a three-dimensional version of Juan Luna’s 1884 Spoliarium became the centerpiece of Lluch’s tableau of more than 20 sculptural pieces in cold cast marble. Occupying a 70-sqm space, Galerie Stephanie’s offering, Irresistible Grace: In the Time of Plague was one of the biggest solo exhibits at the fair.
The prolific terracotta sculptor, famous for depicting women in subjugation and their challenge to patriarchy, borrowed Luna’s metaphor on the sufferings of the Filipino people under Spanish rule. She says of her installation, “I have appropriated Luna’s concept of state brutality to recreate a scenario that is repeated many thousand times over in the streets and alleys among the poor across the country.”
Three years later, Lluch picked up from that theme of a modern Spoliarium to dramatize the horrors of the war on drugs and extra-judicial killings (EJKs) and showed her exhibit titled Chronicles on Skin at Galerie Stephanie in Shangri-La Plaza Mall. Says the committed artist: “I’m doing this show out of a sense of duty and outrage, my own way of helping keep the clamor for justice going, not to let it just fizzle out. I’m also memorializing some personal heroes and heroines, friends and colleagues, in my own humble way.”
Julie Bust of Odette Alcantara_Photo by Gari Buenavista
In between exhibits, Lluch did commissioned works, like public art bronze statues and monuments of our nation’s heroes, statesmen, and martyrs, for the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, mostly. “The assignments took me away for some time from doing personal art, but it was tremendously educative and inspiring.” She made statues of Jose Rizal in Calamba, Laguna, and in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte; Andres Bonifacio and Gregoria de Jesus in San Juan, Metro Manila; Apolinario Mabini in Tanauan, Batangas and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Manila, and Francisco Balagtas in Orion, Bataan. Also, the statues of Mayor Arsenio Lacson along Roxas Boulevard, Ninoy Aquino and Evelio Javier at Baywalk, Marcelo H. del Pilar in Manila, President Manuel Quezon in Baler, Aurora, Chief Justice Cayetano Arellano, Jose Abad Santos, Carlos Bulosan in Pangasinan, Jose W. Diokno in Diliman, former budget secretary and representative Butch Abad’s parents in Batanes, St. Paul de Chartres Life and Mission in Antipolo, and Nazaria Lagos in Iloilo City. She’s a much sought-after sculptor of busts of men and women from different walks of life. The Maningning Miclat Art Foundation, Inc. (MMAFI) is grateful to Lluch, who’s a MMAFI trustee, for the exquisite Maningning trophy she crafts for the winners of the Maningning Miclat Awards for both Art and Poetry.
About her choice of subject in her personal art, Lluch says: “Art is a knee-jerk response to the immediate stimulus in the times we live in. The artist’s commitment is to truth. It is emancipating when I’m able to voice a truth even if there are other voices—dissenting, indifferent, or complicit with the powers that be.”
Most of Lluch’s works are autobiographical and give her much satisfaction. She considers Picasso y Yo her favorite. She says, “In it, I rolled into one the multitude of overlapping identities and roles that I have as a woman, wife, mother, artist, and feminist in protest against high art represented by Picasso and the patriarchy.”
What influenced this brave, committed artist? She waxed nostalgic: “I was 14 when my elder sister, a magnificent English teacher, gave me a book to read—The Quiet Light, a novel based on the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Louis de Wohl. It must have impressed me that much because it moved me to write a review for our school paper, my first ever to be published. When my sister left home to enter religious life, I acquiesced with a heavy heart, saying that for all her gifts, she belonged only to God.” Sister Mary Aquinas Lluch, 85, passed away during the pandemic.
The artist, who’s an alumna of the famous old Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (better known as “Philets”) of the University of Santo Tomas, continued: “Later in college, Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor whom G.K. Chesterton also called the Dumb Ox, became the centerpiece of my Philo studies, making me a bonafide Thomist, handling with reverent care his Summa Theologica, which I borrowed from the restricted section of the library, the largest and thickest book I have ever laid my hands on.”
Lluch continued with her musings: “Christianity overtook me in midlife with its quiet invasion of transfiguring grace. I was drawn irresistibly to this all-consuming fire, a love as strong as death, succumbing to its sweet invitation of absolute forgiveness that led straight to the Wedding Feast!”
Did it affect her art? Did she lose what Federico Garcia Lorca called duende, that powerful art force in his aesthetic theory and writings, by being a Christian? The born-again artist who listens to varied music while working—from Mahler to Cole Porter and U2, to Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven—replied, “No, my art didn’t perish, nor become lame and constricted. I merely stepped into a realm of paradoxes and a relentless engagement with a life too intense even for art!”
On September 20, 7 pm, at the Samsung Theater for Performing Arts in Circuit Makati, the inimitable artist Julie Lluch will receive the prestigious Gawad CCP Para sa Sining 2024 from the CCP “for her terracotta sculptures that mirror and reflect the wisdom she had acquired as she took on different life roles.”
There was an explosion of warm congratulatory remarks and messages sent to Lluch, some of which came from the members of her Bible study group called Church Café.
French-educated writer Jenny Juan writes: “Lluch has broken the clay barrier and the award is a milestone. Long relegated to the ranks of artisanal craft, terra cotta or fired clay sculpture has been given its titres de noblesse, its certificate of nobility.”
Elizabeth Lolarga, a poet and journalist, shared: “The CCP Award is, I think, a belated one that recognizes her pioneering efforts in terracotta sculpture. Julie to me is a sensuous woman, a sensual artist who needs to touch her medium repeatedly in an intimate way for it to grow into something recognizable and astonishing. I first saw her sculptures of Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin at Rustan’s Galerie Bleue in my 20s, and the huge phallic symbol at the center of the space struck me as a nascent but bold feminist statement. She was still married then with small children, which all made the statement bolder. Nick kept saying in a drunken slur while gazing and pointing at the phallus, ‘Isn’t it beautiful, dahling? Isn’t it beautiful?’”
Poet and Palanca Hall of Famer Ruth Elynia Mabanglo waxes poetic: “Higit pa sa mga gawad ng pagkilala at parangal ang karapat-dapat na ipagkaloob kay Julie. Siya ang kaisa-isang tala sa kalangitan ng sining sa eskultura. Malalim ang hugot ng damdamin sa kanyang mga obra na hindi naman sumusuway sa mataas na pamantayan ng larangang ginagalawan. May mainam na pagkakasal ng anyo at paksa; ng pahiwatig at nilalaman; ng dating at bisa. Mahigpit na nakipil niya ang mahusay na paglalahok ng materyal sa paraan ng paglalahad. Katangi-tangi siya bilang eskultor na pinamamayanihan ng mga lalaking manlilikha. Mabuhay si Julie at ang kanyang mga lilok!”
(More than awards of recognition and tribute should be given to Julie. She is the only star in the firmament of art of sculpture. Her emotional tug on her works is deep yet inviolable of the high standard of the art. There’s a fine marriage of form and subject; of allusion and content; perception and effect. She firmly grasps the adept melding of material and expression. She’s exceptional as a sculptor in the field where men prevail. Long live Julie and her sculptures!)
Octogenarian historian Fe Mangahas was brief but emphatic: “For me, women sculptors are rare. And Julie Lluch is not just one of the rare ones. She excels and surpasses—both in her rendition of and sensitivity to women’s condition, struggle, and triumphs. Truly great!”
Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, a writer on films and other genres of art and literature, exults: “I see Julie as a woman in her flowers (full Georgia’s a-blooming, if you please), one whose creative powers stem from her earth mother groundedness as well as her deep spirituality. Her art brings forth what is innately, humanly good from within her. Her works are her prayers to the ultimate God creator within us all.”
Josephine Bracken by Julie Lluch
Jenny Llaguno, a fictionist, says, “Julie Lluch: woman created after His image. Now: sculptor of consequence in the world of art. Her pieces explain themselves: the violence she depicts as a housewife reacts to the tears emitted by onions in her chaotic kitchen, suggesting what she feels in her art, as she expresses in kilometric long letters the passion of Josephine Bracken for our national hero, the same devotion she feels for the Supreme as she speaks in our Bible Study, artistry for the Lord; her various renditions of the vagina, the ever-mysterious object that was sculpted for us to ponder. This is Julie, ever the female of God’s works, the eternal woman if ever there was one. She has the nod of the Lord to be a National Artist, as proclaimed in glorifying the Supreme in what she creates herself.
Church Cafe at the art-filled home of Imelda Cajipe Endaya
And finally, Imelda Cajipe Endaya, who is known for her art advocacy focused on women and centering on the nation’s history and culture, writes: “Am so happy and proud of my long-time friend and Kasibulan co-founder Julie Lluch being bestowed a Gawad CCP. She was first among us to be awakened into feminism. I hold her in high respect for her integrity of vision and craftsmanship, even as she is highly in demand for commissioned works. How she balances sensuousness with spirituality and Christian faith is amazing.”
Other awardees for the Gawad CCP are Generoso “Gener” Caringal for his choreographic works that integrate ballet, modern dance, and folk dance; Jose Iñigo Homer “Joey” Ayala for his works as a composer, songwriter, and singer who uses indigenous musical instruments; Maria Lea Carmen Salonga for her achievements as a performing artist who has been recognized internationally, bringing the Philippines onto the world stage; Jose Lacaba, Jr. for his great works of writing as a poet, essayist, screenwriter, and journalist; and Miguel “Mike” De Leon for his work as a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer. Mario O’Hara is posthumously awarded for his work as director, screen and theater actor, and writer; Gino Gonzales, scenographer and production designer, for his use of non-conventional and everyday industrial and commercial materials, as well as his promotion of the Philippine terno; the Loboc Children’s Choir, ambassadors of Bohol preserving local heritage through music; and Marilyn Gamboa, for her excellent work as a cultural administrator in Negros Occidental.
Posthumously receiving the Tanging Parangal ng CCP are Sen. Edgardo J. Angara and Zenaida “Nedy” R. Tantoco. Angara is recognized as an arts advocate and supporter of Philippine culture and the arts, while Tantoco’s philanthropic work has benefited the CCP, its resident companies, and its employees, as she served as a CCP trustee, supporting the opera and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra by raising funds for the acquisition and upkeep of musical instruments.
