MASTERPIECE. The artist shows picture of the retablo he crafted for the Collegio Filippino at the Vatican.
PHOTO BY BONG LACSON
GUAGUA, Pampanga – He gets up at 3 in the morning and starts carving images and sometimes he paints.
The fresh smell of cedar and pine that fill the moist morning air inside his workshop transports him back to Seville in Spain where he fine tuned his art by learning from the masters.
He is renowned Betis sculptor Wilfredo “Willy” T. Layug, a recipient of the Presidential Merit Award for Ecclesiastical Art and a Most Outstanding Kapampangan Awardee whose works include the retablo at the Pontifico Collegio Filipino or Pontifi cal Filipino College in Rome for the chapel at its crypt.
Layug’s thirst for knowledge has brought him to many parts of the world especially in Europe where he joins pilgrimages and frequents exhibits as well as observing and studying the works of the masters to improve his craft.
Donning an almost wornout white T-shirt at his workshop adjacent to his home at the Betis Galleria at Sta. Ursula, Layug said his worst fear is that the woodcarving industry is slowly dying in his hometown.
Thus his mission to help resurrect it. “Gugulisak ku, mamamate ya ing woodcarving kekami (I’m shouting, the wood carving industry in our place is dying). What would you do? What will those who hear the cry do?
“There are no more succeeding generations of woodcarvers,” he laments. The transfer of woodcarving skills from father to son that went unbroken for so long is gone, he added. Layug narrated that during his younger days, he was introduced into the woodcarving environment in Betis. He said the staccato of the mallet hitting the chisel to cut on wood became music to his ears.
“You cannot ignore that,” he said, “so eventually you become a woodcarver too.” He said their elders at that time look highly to the woodcarving industry and they even encouraged their children to just venture into woodcarving instead of going to high school because it was very lucrative.
Layug said a teacher and an engineer turned into woodcarvers because it was an alternative which earned them more than what they got from their professions. “It’s no longer like that anymore,” he said. “My townmates no longer see woodcarving as a lucrative alternative that’s why it’s a dying industry here,” he added.
Betis is in the world map as woodcarving capital, he said. But Layug said he gets a feeling of deja vu in Concepcion, Tarlac. He said an agricultural village there progressed because of the woodcarving industry.
There will come a time, he said, when Betis will be in Concepcion. The village in that town produces 20 woodcarvers a year, said Layug, because of the efforts of Myrna Bituin, a furniture magnate also from Betis.
Layug said Bituin trained young woodcarvers and imparted woodcarving skills to village folk there. “I cannot blame her for that because she needs to resurrect the industry for her woodcarving business to maintain her production quotas. She needs to train them.”
“Now it is a challenge for me here in Betis because how can we ever allow Concepcion to produce woodcarvers when there are none here,” he lamented. Layug said in Paete, Laguna the woodcarvers are diversified because they now have ice sculpting, fruit carving and even papier-mache making.
He recalled a competition in a university pitting Betis versus Paete in contemporary art. There were eight awards he said and Betis had 23 woodcarvers while Paete had only seven entries but got all the awards.
“None for Betis because the Betis craftsmen were limited in their experience unlike the Paete woodcarvers who have vast experiences in contemporary art because they joined international galleries,” Layug said.
“They excluded me from the competition by making me a judge,” he said with a laugh. Paete though gave up in the field of ecclesiastical art because it cannot match the present Betis craftsman, he eunthused.
Layug said he always pays homage to Juan Flores everytime he gets interviewed because he “reinvented” the woodcarving industry in Betis in the 1940s. But sadly, he said, Apung Juan left no legacy to speak of because not even his son managed to preserve his work. “Ing mali ng Apung Juan ampo ing anak na ing tutulid ku (I’m now trying to correct the mistake of Apung Juan and his son),” he said.
Flores, a foremost woodcarver, studied in Manila and imparted his skills to his townmates in Betis.
Meanwhile, Layug said he is now just waiting for the two trusses, made of yakal and molave, removed from the Betis church for some retrofi tting, where he can carve the images of St. James and Our Lady of Del Pilar for the church where he also worked earlier on its tabernacle and the image of Padre Pio.
The church is just one – and the first –of two Pampanga edifices of faith declared as national treasures by the National Museum, the other being Minalin’s Sta. Monica Church.
