ON MULTIPLICITY OF STYLES

By Arnel Mirasol

My painting above, Circo de Amor, clearly show the stylistic and thematic gulf separating my current artworks from those I did in the nineteen-eighties (below).  My high school classmate, Vince Tabirara, remarked that he can't quite figure out my style. He said that my artworks don't have a common look that would readily identify them as mine. I replied that my having a multiplicity of styles was inevitable, considering that the artworks he saw in my portfolio were done over a period of thirty years.

I could cite the names of numerous painters whose bodies of works would reveal several stylistic changes. Pablo Picasso was, of course, the most prominent and extreme example.Picasso was a child prodigy. He can already draw like Raphael when he was twelve years old, and he was just fifteen or sixteen when he came out with the paintings comparable to the mature works of the leader of the French Realist School, Gustave Courbet - The First Communion and Science and Charity. (below)

But Picasso wouldn't rest on his laurels. He chucked off that realist style for good in Paris when he created his poignant series of blue paintings. But before that, on the eve of his departure from Spain, he did a suite of pastel drawings more evocative of Roualt - with their dark outlines and simplified figures - than of Courbet. Picasso's Blue Period paintings, done during his starving years, were pictures of sadness, poverty, and misfortune. In 1907, he came out with the landmark work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon which was to become the prototype for Cubism. He next did his Neo-classical series, where the figures this time were of massive proportions, strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo, although very much simplified. The painting which many consider his masterpiece, the Guernica, was apparently a fusion or synthesis of his cubist and neo-classic styles. Picasso went on to create more paintings, so innovative and revolutionary in form, that art historians now find hard to label or classify. (selected samples of Picasso's paintings below.)

Another painter who have trekked the style spectrum, so to speak, was the surrealist Salvador Dali, who started out as an impressionist. (selected samples of Dali's paintings below) With the advent of cubism, he promptly did paintings that hewed closely to Picasso's style. He also did mixed-media, minimalist abstracts when abstraction was in vogue. When he became a member of the surrealist movement he focused his efforts on creating dream-inspired paintings rendered in his trademark illusionistic manner. But unlike Picasso who stuck to his deconstructions or distortion of the human figure to the end, Dali's imagery in his later years , especially in his massive religious murals, showed a resurgent concern with correct anatomy.

Other painters who've switched styles in the course of their career were Camille Pissaro, George Braque,Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Stanley Spencer among the foreign painters, and Vicente Manansala, Hernando Ocampo, Jerry Navarro, Prudencio Lamarrosa, and Bencab, among the Filipinos.

So you see, switching styles doesn't really diminished a painter. The opposite could in fact be true, because that can also be a mark of versatility, or even ingenuity. It might actually be just a revelation of the painter's restless spirit and fondness for experimentation, and urge to elevate his art to a new and higher level.

(below, selected paintings by Bencab)

National Artist Benedicto Cabrera (Bencab)