Exhibition Notes: Old-fashioned Fairy Tale Arr

  



(The Exhibition Notes I wrote for my second solo exhibit at The Crucible Gallery in 2001)


Essay 48. OLD-FASHIONED FAIRYTALE ART

ARNEL MIRASOL's second solo show, titled "Old-fashioned Fairy Tale Art", is on view from September 8 to 30 at the Crucible Gallery. Featured are the eleven illustrations for the picture book "Once Upon a Time". Published by Tahanan Books for Young Readers, the book is a compilation of ten Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale classics as retold by Fran Ng. Included, among others, are such timeless stories like the "Little Mermaid", "The Wild Swans", "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 took up Fine Arts major in Painting at the University of Santo Tomas and the University of the East. He was a recipient of a Best Entry Award and the co-winner of the Grand Prize in the first Metrobank Annual Painting Competition in 1984. He was also a runner-up in the Tokyo-based Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustration in 2000. Before immersing himself in illustration, first as an editorial cartoonist, and later as a book illustrator, Mirasol was a full-time painter whose social-realism had touches of surrealist imagery. 

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. Because, regardless of such intricacies, the very whimsicality of the tales exerts a centripetal pull on the artworks, forcing them to stay within the charmed and ascientific realm of fairy tale art.



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