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