Exhibition Notes for "Old-fashioned Fairy Tale Art"

By Arnel Mirasol

The Farmer and his Wife, 1999, acrylic on paper, 20 X 7 inches, Reni Roxas collection

Arnel Mirasol 's solo art show titled Old-fashioned Fairy Tale Art is on view from September 8 to 30 (2001) at the Crucible Gallery. Featured are eleven illustrations for the picture book Once Upon a Time. Published by Tahanan Books for Young Readers, the anthology contains a retelling by Fran Ng of ten Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale classics, including such timeless stories as the Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, and the Nightingale.

Completed after fourteen months of painstaking work, the illustrations were created the old-fashioned way, so to speak, without the artist resorting to such technical aids as airbrush and computer software. Noticeable is the quaint hyperrealist style of the artworks, which separate them further from the slew of illustration art being churned out nowadays.

Mirasol studied fine arts at the University of Santo Tomas and the University of the East, and was a recipient of a Best Entry Award in the first Metrobank Annual Painting Competition in 1984. He was also a runner-up in the Tokyo-based UNESCO-Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustration in 2000. Before immersing himself in illustration, first as a political cartoonist, and later as a book illustrator, Mirasol was a full-time painter whose social-realism had touches of surrealist imagery. It was a painting from that period which won for him the top prize in the Metrobank annual.

A picture book illustrator for five years now, Mirasol's fidelity to details had been described by a fellow painter as obsessive. Which he doesn't deny. Despite the near miniaturist scale of the artworks, Mirasol still managed to depict the textural nuances of even the minutest element in his pictures. Floral and faunal details were so intricately rendered that the pictures are sometimes in danger of straying into another quite distinct field - that of scientific illustration. No need to worry, however.  Notwithstanding  such intricacies, the whimsicality of the tales exert a centripetal pull on the artworks, forcing them to stay within the charmed and ascientific realm of fairy tale art.

Thumbelina, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Mark Yap collection

The Little Mermaid, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Mark Yap collection

The Wild Swans, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Reni Roxas collection

The Nightingale, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Manolet Delfin collection

Princess and the Pea, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Bobby Roxas collection

The Little Match Girl, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Mercedes Tan-Rodrigo collection

The Traveling Companion 1, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, May C.  Reyes collection

The Traveling Companion 2, 2000, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, private collection

The Ugly Duckling, 2001, acrylic on paper, 10 X 12.5 inches, Segundo Matias Jr. collection

The Emperor's New Clothes, 2001, acrylic on paper, 20 X 12.5 inches, May C. Reyes collection

Illustration art as fine art

By Constantino Tejero

ARNEL MIRASOL is a bit disappointed that local art writers seem to ignore his exhibits of illustrations. The more reason for disappointment that the sentiment comes from someone whom some consider the Philippines' "own Maxfield Parrish." But his is not the only case, as most often such shows are not taken by art critics as seriously as they would an exhibit of abstraction, installations, assemblages or some such esoterica.

Which is rather puzzling, considering the painstaking effort, stylistic skill and deep thought that can also go into illustration art. Consider Mirasol's third solo exhibit, "ptgs & illus," 21 pieces in acrylic on paper and oil on canvas, recently in Crucible Gallery at the Artwalk, L/4, Bldg.A, SM Megamall, Mandaluyong City. The show comprises eight paintings on the theme of machismo, 2 cover art, and 11 illustrations for the book Long Ago and Far Away (right), a retelling of 10 Brothers Grimm fairy tales by Fran Ng and Rene Villanueva. All are rendered in Mirasol's trademark sharp-focus realist style, which he learned from the small brush technique of Parrish and Wyeth.

Although he first thrived on monochrome, in pen and ink drawing as political cartoonist and in black-and-white line drawing as a textbook illustrator, Mirasol also stands out as a colorist. He can blend complementary colors so that the brilliance of each hue doesn't clash with the others, but rather harmonizes, as in the machismo paintings Seraglio Fantasy and Snorkeler's Blues. But even more than his delicate colorism, the viewer appreciates his fine rendering of form. His illustrative skill goes beyond mere narrative.

The viewer can immediately see it in the painstaking details of a piece such as Supremacy of Eve:  the grains of the loose soil; the ribbing of the banana leaves, and even how the light falls on the front and the back of each leaf; the yellow overripe bananas on the ground; the tiny yellow and purple flowers of some weeds.

Or look at the paisley print of Rapunzel's gown, and the meticulous braiding of her kilometric hair; the sheen and the folds of the witch's robe; the rough texture of the yellow ochre wall; the delicate crystal decanter in the niche; even the linear perspective of the chessboard floor that's executed with unnerving exactitude. Mirasol took up Fine Arts for two years at University of Santo Tomas, shifted to Architecture, then Engineering, and later resumed his art studies in University of the East. For a time he work as an editorial cartoonist for a newspaper. Inspired by a book on Dali, he decided to paint full-time, went through a Social Realist phase, and won the top prize in the First Metrobank Annual Painting Competition in 1984.

His illustrations for The Origin of the Frog was a runner-up in the 2000 Unesco-Noma Concours for Picture-Book Illustrations. With The Brothers Wu and the Good-Luck Eel he was registered in the 2002 Honour List of the International Board on Books for Young People. Such awards, however, hardly go into his head. Upon seeing the illustrations of Gennady Spirin, Wayne Anderson and James Christensen, he says he had been deeply humbled. "The truth that the quality of my works are still way below the world's standard became evident to me," he recalls. Like most graphic illustrators, Mirasol is one of our virtually unsung artists. This show, however, handily proves that illustration can be as fine an art as any.

(June 25, 2007, Philippine Daily Inquirer)

ARNEL MIRASOL; ARTIST PROFILE

ARNALDO MIRASOL was born and raised in Tondo, Manila, Philippines. He took up Fine Arts, major in painting at the University of Santo Tomas and the University of the East. Mirasol began working as a professional artist in 1981, when he was hired as editorial cartoonist for the newspaper People's Journal Tonight. In 1987, he applied and was hired for the same job in Joe Burgos' We Forum Publications. In between his cartooning stints, Mirasol worked as gallery assistant at the Galeria de las Islas, and was an educational book illustrator from 1988 to 2000

In 1996, Mirasol showed his portfolio to Reni Roxas and Marc Singer, publishers of Tahanan Books for Young Readers. Being especially impressed by the cover art he did for Phoenix Publishing House, Reni and Marc commissioned Mirasol to do the illustrations for their collaborative book First Around the Globe: The Story of Enrique. Mirasol went on to illustrate four more books for Tahanan: Tamales Day, The Brothers Wu and the Good-Luck Eel, Once Upon a Time, and Long Ago and Far Away. Mirasol's other books are Origin of the Frog, Anina ng mga Alon (Anina of the Waves), and Mga Modernong Alamat Volume 4. Two of his books are prize-winners abroad. The Origin of the Frog won a runner-up award in the 12th Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustration in Tokyo, in 2000. While the excellence of his illustrations for The Brothers Wu and the Good-Luck Eel landed him on the Honour List of the Basel-based International Board on Books for Young people (IBBY).

Mirasol has had three solo art exhibitions, so far - once at the Hiraya Gallery and twice at the Crucible. He had also participated in several group exhibitions. His paintings in the eighties, although belonging to the social-realist school, were tempered somewhat with surrealist color and humor. One of his paintings from that period, the  Hungry Child Dissected, won in 1984, one of the three Best Entry awards in the First Metrobank Annual painting Competition. 2008 was a landmark year for Mirasol. It was during that time that he finally weaned himself away from the sharp-focus realist style of his previous paintings. While his earlier works were rendered with a meticulous attention to details, his recent illustrations and paintings - with their simplification, distortion, and loud coloration - have a decidedly modern and pop art feel to them. Mirasol still lives in Tondo, with wife Carina, and sons Brando de Niro and Karel Andrei. He is popularly known as Arnel Mirasol in the Philippine art circle.

Krusada sa Kalikasan

By Arnel Mirasol

The Kapentura group opens its first major art exhibit, KRUSADA SA KALIKASAN, at the Artasia Gallery. The paintings to be shown will revolve around the theme of environmental degradation and its now anticipated regeneration. That theme has been tackled many times in the past - particularly and expertly so by Prudencio Lamarroza - whose Amburayan Queen series served as inspirational matrix for many younger painters who looked up to him as their master. 

Today, with the assumption by Gina Lopez of the post of DENR Secretary, there is renewed hope that the long-time bane of environmentalist, like destructive mining, illegal fish pens, and air pollution, would finally be put to a stop. That is a tall order. But with the perceived sincerity of the Secretary, and her vigorous and prompt sanction of the mining firms, we can expect nothing less than a real overhaul of the whole ecologically-destructive mindset that pervades our culture.

The Kapentura group was "conceived" in Malolos Bulacan, when the group of Danny Pangan. Danny Rodriguez, and Nemencio Macapugay lingered in a coffee-shop inside Robinson Place while waiting for the opening of a film showing in a cinema there. The group had with them that time their sketchpads and drawing tools. So, to pass the time, they proceeded to do sketches of the pretty baristas and the security guard. That activity became a weekly Monday routine for them. Last May, the group was invited to join the Art & Appetite event at the Bonifacio Global City (BGC), where they rented a booth to display their artworks. That event at the BGC marked the official "birth" of the Kapentura group, who had since exhibited in New York, and had conducted several plein air painting sessions on a farm in Bulacan.

Krusada is considered as the group's first major art exhibit because the members will be exhibiting in full force, so to speak, for the first time. Members based in the United States will be here to join the show together with the founding members and the new recruits. The participating artists are Helen Dimaya-Amladi, John Wesley Bautista, Fidelis Balagtas-Belda, Frank Caña, Butch Jacinto, Dan Macapugay, Nemencio Macapugay, Arnel Mirasol, Danny Pangan, Josefino Rodriguez, Avelino San Juan, Jerome Sta. Maria, April Gamboa-Villacorta, Art Zamora, and Ponciano Zapanta.

The show opens on November 8, Tuesday, at 6 pm. The Artasia Gallery is on the 4th floor of Megamall Building A, Mandaluyong City. For inquiries, please call Lenny : 09182130590 or 634 5945.