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Villalba.- The artistic talent of Jesús Ortiz-Torres is innate. From a very young age his hands and creative mind gave free rein to his talents with something as simple as mud. This 69-year-old man still remembers being on the dirt floor of his humble little house’s kitchen in Barrio Jagüeyes, Villalba, where he would watch his mother María José Torres cooking cassava “because there wasn’t much to eat.”

But, when the rain fell and wet his house, he began to shape faces on the ground and decorated his artworks with marbles, making it clear that he would become a great artist.

Ortiz-Torres keeps a painting he made from that domestic moment of his life that currently adorns his kitchen. It is meant to remind him of his origins as an artist and the good times of his childhood.

“That painting is the answer to how I began as an artist. That was my house, the floor was made of mud, so when I was about four years old and it rained, it would become a muddy mess and I started making faces with it. I also remember that they were using cement when they built the church here, and there was always a little bit of cement left over that I would bring with me and make a lot of faces and put marbles on them. So, there were all these faces in the house and mom was very happy to put them all up on the walls,” the sculptor recalled.

The home where he grew up still houses many of his artworks. They range from cement, high relief and bronze sculptures, as well as paintings, assemblage and caricatures. Each wall has a special meaning and Ortiz-Torres hopes to one day turn it into a museum.

“My brother and I live here. But I’m thinking of making a museum there; it would be called the ‘Museo del Artista Pela’o’ (‘Broke Artist Museum’) because there are a lot of little details that give away how they were previously recycled,” confessed the artist from Villalba.

Ortiz-Torres, who dedicated 30 years of his life to teaching art classes at the Ponce School of Fine Arts and even taught courses at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico at Ponce, maintained that each of his facets as an artist has its specific moment, and he practices the one that best suits each stage of his life.

“I have dedicated myself to art my entire life. The point is to do different things, you can’t always be doing the same thing. Each era has its manifestation and that’s what this is about. But, it depends on the situations. Now I’m doing more social and political satire cartoons than anything else because we’re in a kind of complex situation here in Puerto Rico. Cartoons are for the people, they get to the point, they’re more direct. Art is more spiritual, you say the same things, but few people understand it,” explained the artist.

Something that is important for Ortiz-Torres is that there is no schedule when it comes to entering his workshop. The space allocated just outside his home has a corner for each of the mediums he masters. He claims that he comes and goes without keeping track of time. Furthermore, he said that his art is not meant to replicate things, but to give his interpretation to what he is seeing or feeling.

“I have to paint with a lot of light. But my thing is not to replicate identically because that’s what photography is for; I make an interpretation. I also have a table to sculpt; when I get tired of being over there, I come here and keep making sculptures,” he said while taking an instrument to carve lines on a plasticine sculpture in the shape of John the Baptist’s head.

Among the most recognized artworks of Ortiz-Torres is the mural that stands at the entrance of Villalba that captures the history and essence of its people.

The imposing work of art has two pieces that measure 8 feet wide by 16 feet high each, and are attached to a cement wall that measures about 30 feet in height. On one side it has the city’s coat of arms, while on the other it has a compendium of several images that highlight important details of Villalba, such as the cultivation of pigeon peas, which is very traditional, the lakes that characterize this town among other elements that served as inspiration for its production.

“I was inspired by the history of Villalba, by what we have, by what we do. The first thing we are going to see are the hands of the Villalba worker who is planting pigeon peas, harvesting and shelling them. Pigeon pea pods, the pigeon pea flowers, are depicted there too. It also shows Villalba’s two founders: Walter McJones and José Ramón-Figueroa. We have the lakes because Villalba is known as ‘La ciudad de los lagos’ (‘The City of Lakes’), the mountains and the trees. Other elements that stand out are the sun, the symbols of cooperativity because we are pioneers in that area and the half marathon, because it’s a sporting tradition event in our town. Here is the essence, history and symbolism of Villalba,” described the sculptor about the mural he worked in cast bronze.