Jaime de Guzman: The return?

Jaime de Guzman came back last week from Bangkok, where he visited for three weeks to check out his latest grandchild. The boy, named Carlos Jaime – in honor of the dear departed Caloy Abrera and the lolo – came courtesy of Jaime’s second son Orlando, a journalist married to an American lady who’s been doing NGO work in northern Thailand. Being the family man, the pater familia par excellence, Jaime couldn’t help but join the welcome committee for Orlando’s and Anne’s firstborn.

Time flies. Or waddles along. I hark back to the late ’70s and early ’80s, when I would tag along with the Abreras and call on the De Guzmans in Candelaria, Quezon, where Jaime and his Anne had started a kiln.

Fausto, the De Guzmans’ eldest, and siblings Orlando, Mutya and Jesus or "Chuchi" were being trained to be vegans at the time. And I was yet criminally inclined to knock PC or politically correct notions off even domestic shelves, so that I’d secretly treat the kids to cans of corned beef and Spam pulled out of my knapsack. When Anne or Jaime weren’t looking, of course. Or when they were, I’d ask the kids to lead me to the nearest beach, and there we’d tear up the de lata, much to everyone’s less-than-guilty relish. Those kids and I, we shared an unspeakable bond.

I recall that Fausto seemed so mature and responsible even then, when he was probably just pushing 10, while Orlando was the inquisitive yet very polite little fellow. Mutya, tawny mestiza, was one of the boys, while cute, curly-haired Chuchi would made kulit when Fausto, Orlando and I took turns over a chessboard.

The De Guzmans had three other kids, in due time: David who was probably a baby then, followed by Jonas, and finally Dulimay or "Imay," who was born in Sagada on a full-moon night.

Fausto and his Baguio-bred wife are now in Seattle, raising their identical twins, Angelica and Julienne. I hear that Fausto has been professionally engaged as a counselor. The third grandchild, a boy (is he Jose or Pedro?), was born to Chuchi, now a carpenter and home builder, and his Filipina wife. The last time he visited his Dad in Candelaria, he fashioned excellent kayaks.

Mutya is doing para-legal work while completing law studies. Jonas and Imay, now also sometimes called "Dolly," are both in school as well. Their mother Anne, who took local pottery to a superior level in the couple of decades she spent here, also lives in Seattle, but I believe only Imay is with her. I hear too that dear Anne’s gone back to painting, and that this happened soon after she had wept over the lamentable news of Caloy’s passing last April. Taking pride of place in the Abrera home is a large painting Anne had done of Caloy garbed as a friar.

The kids invariably come home to the Philippines, for visits brief or lengthy. But it’s David who’s apparently come back for good. He stays with Jaime in Candelaria.

There Jaime has been regularly painting again, doing fine work that has had his select cult of collectors licking their chops for an imminent reclaiming of his early, rather exalted status as an artists’ artist.

In 1971, if memory serves me right, I first visited with Jaime and Anne in Liliw, Laguna, on an assignment to do a magazine feature (Was it for Satyre? Or Franklin Cabaluna’s soft-porn Pic?) Jaime de Guzman had just come back from a study grant in Mexico, where he had apprenticed under the great muralist David Alfaro Siquieros (one of Mexico’s distinguished triumvirate of muralist-painters, together with Diego Rivera and Clemente Orozco).

There he had met Anne Polkinghorn, who was conducting anthropological research with a team from Berkeley, California. Their romance became legend for Manila’s journalists (this was several years before Bencab met up with London’s Caroline Kennedy), especially when they got married in Liliw and settled there, in an ancestral wooden house ringed by six lanzones trees. (Memory serves! I think those trees figured in my title for the feature.)

The house had been bequeathed by Jaime’s Lolo Fausto, a Katipunero who served under Gen. Antonio Luna. He became a notary public, but he also wrote plays and zarzuelas, translated Spanish poems to Tagalog, and composed rondalla music.

Anne taught Jaime all about centering. She was an accomplished potter, and in Liliw they began to work together on stoneware. The townsfolk thought them curious as a couple, if not eccentric, since they introduced the soon-to-be-hippie fashion that was katsa shirts.

But Jaime the painter brought art and honor to Liliw, the sleepy town noted for its slippers. He was fast turning into Manila’s toast as a dynamic young artist – dashingly handsome and articulate, spouting strong opinions about creativity. The art writers of the ’70s lavished his work with praise, among them Jose Joya, Andres Cristobal Cruz, Barbara Mae Naredo, Domini Torrevillas Suarez, Beatriz Romualdez Francia, Leonidas Benesa and Ray Albano.

Wrote Albano: "His pictures depend on his phenomenological pursuit of his brushstrokes. He makes abstract dabs and dashes all over the board, sees them and conforms them to the shapes and objects stacked in his memory… Somewhere in the changing climate of Philippine art is Jaime de Guzman working against the grain of both the pundits of semi-representation and precursors of ‘new’ art. His figures are un-anatomical, his work more evocative than literal. Aside from these we think De Guzman is recording some metaphysical insights by means of his personal mythology."

Jaime de Guzman created the set for Virginia R. Moreno’s groundbreaking theater piece, Itim Asu (a translation into Tagalog of her prizewinning The Onyx Wolf or La Loba Negra.). It was staged at the CCP, then brought over to Liliw. The town was agog. Led by an enlightened mayor, they shared in the triumphant return of a native son who lured in more than the slippered set in the cause of theater, painting and ceramics.

Jaime did a mural right on the municipal hall lobby, and it was a splendid sight indeed, with his Cubistic lines and figures of folklore and flora ranging from wall to wall, even swirling up alongside the corner stairs.

He liked to point out then that Carlos "Botong" Francisco was the only one who came very close to proper mural practice. Botong’s works, however, were on mural canvas, which could be transferred from place to place, whereas in Mexico the mural paintings were "permanent fixtures, part of the wall if not the total building."

"A mural is an experience," he stressed. "It envelops the viewers; it’s a man-made, forced environment." The art had reached a high level of technology, Jaime explained, "its known executors having worked on oils and other mediums specifically to withstand the elements and produce major works of art. Whereas local limitations have included lack of such oils and walls to paint."

(Hmm. Calling on the Fort Boni honchos. Your fine examples of public art will surely be enhanced by a new building with a built-in capacity to provide venues for murals.)

De Guzman’s large-scale canvases, which frolicked darkly on the margins of expressionism and surrealism, employed a motley array of folk symbols and personal motifs. He explained in an interview: "How does Christ relate to Filipinos? Here we are confronted with the images of Christ in taxicabs, in the homes of rich and poor, everywhere. But most of these pictures may be considered safe because they don’t have any personal touch to it. Like the face of Christ, which is all white face, blue eyes and golden hair. What I’m trying to do is give my personal interpretation of Christ as a symbol."

One such interpretation was rendered in "Waiting for the Apostles," showing Jesus sitting in the middle of a room of a typical provincial house, idly waiting. Christ also appears as the central figure in "Historical Allegory," a large, major work that drew appreciative gasps when it was exhibited at Sining Kamalig in 1973.

Christ has the fingers of one hand touching his symbolic crowned heart, while the other holds up a sword. The Gomburza martyrs appear beside him, balanced on the other side by a framed portrait of Jose Rizal, while in the distant background above the central images is Miss Liberty and a group of faceless politicians and clergymen. A pregnant Anne, robed in white, red and blue, stands on one side, counterpointed by a self-portrait of the artist, loin-thonged only with leaves. And stealing the show in front of the Gomburza trio is the naked toddler Fausto, then about a year old.

If I’m not mistaken, it was this painting that led Imelda Marcos, who was the guest of honor at the show’s opening, to commission or purchase a subsequent, even larger painting of a dramatically crucified figure for display at the CCP lobby. Whatever happened to that humongous canvas, by the by?

Imaginably, a couple will not produce and raise a large brood – seven children in the De Guzmans’ case – if they weren’t so magnificently and magnanimously in love. Neither might they experience a crossover of art genres, as Jaime and Anne did.

Jaime became so enamored of Anne, the family, and pottery that he devoted the next decade of his life to helping her come up with a successful, efficient kiln, from Liliw to Candelaria. At some point they were producing high-fire output, inclusive of raku and celadon, as a thriving cottage industry called Mount Banahaw Pottery. Why, Jaime even provided La Moreno’s Café Orfeo in Malate with a celadon mural and an enviable ceramic chess set and table.

Throughout their years together in Liliw and Candelaria in the ’70s, thence Sagada in the ’80s, Anne and Jaime were determined to raise a tightly knit family and produce fine pottery. Other writers – Lina Espina Moore, Josephine Pasricha, Belinda Olivares Cunanan, Emmie M. Altamirano and Gilda Cordero Fernando – continued to glory in the romance of their conjugal creativity.

Jaime’s early patrons and collectors kept hoping that at least he wouldn’t turn his back entirely on painting. But Jaime had written a poem early in the ’70s, which went: "The creative process does not stop/ when there are no walls to unwall/ There is always something to do/ Wedge the clay, invent a little/ It is good for the mind/ To feel the earth, to water it, to form it/ and be formed/ There is the fire/ In the night in harmony/ with the stars/ in the day as bright as the sun/ In a pot/ In a jewel/ from the fire."

I understand Jaime’s continuing journey as an artist who refuses to be dictated upon by the law of supply and demand. He is as peripatetic spiritually as he is physically. His Philippines has spanned Candelaria to Sagada, Liliw to Kiangan, Dumaguete to Palawan, and much more, well beyond.

When Anne went back to the US after she herself had tried her hand at painting, Jaime kept on centering, producing ceramic drums from kilns in Sagada. Now that their children have grown up, Jaime has found more time to go it alone, try out other places of idyll for a renewal of what an art critic of the ’70s called his "innerscapes."

And there is good word, that he has indeed been painting happily. The dark swirls are gone, the mythic symbolism and surrealism a thing of the past – for the nonce, anyway.

The return to oils and pastel and drawings started in the last years in Sagada in the late ’80s. His output was irregular, but collectors who swear by his art were elated that little by little, their new walls would be given over to De Guzman’s landscapes. One truly outstanding work was "Night Birds," which celebrated the seasonal net-catching of migratory fowl on Mt. Ampakao.

In the ’90s, Jaime traveled often to Dumaguete, and produced a superlative Apo Island series. This millennium, Jaime has sortied through Vigan and Sorsogon. And beyond.

As a friend and admirer, while I appreciate the expression of concern by others – that Jaime de Guzman ought to be reintroduced in the art scene in a big way, as he has been little known to the second- and third-generation collectors/investors – there is more than enough assurance that a powerful legacy is written in the stars cavorting over Jaime’s private mountains.

The same fellow who recently wished for a Jaime redux said it best himself, that afternoon we had coffee and he had asked which artists I thought merited books on their lifework —- and I had replied: Pandy Aviado, Santi Bose, Danny Dalena and Jaime de Guzman, who are great artists as much as they’re our great friends.

He agreed, and that was when he made the pitch: "Jaime is an artist for artists. His intensity can be seen in his fiery eyes, even now, at 62 years of age. He has mellowed a lot, as reflected in his recent works. But the man remains to be true and simple. He paints for art’s sake, and hardly concerns himself with the current per-square-inch mentality pervading the art scene today."

My turn to nod. Yes, yes. In his own good time, Jaime de Guzman will astound everyone anew. The irony of it is that it can’t be hoped, or said, that we deserve his comeback. For he’s never really left us, nor his art.