Profile

ARNALDO MIRASOL (born 25 June 1956) grew up 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 series of 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", "An Introduction to Economics", "Anina ng mga Alon (Anina of the Waves)", "Mga Modernong Alamat (Modern Myths) Volume 4", and "Ang Palasyo sa Serena (The Mermaid's Castle)". 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 supposed 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 is currently working on his eleventh book, a narrative that has as its setting pre-war Malabon---a Philippine town famous for its Spanish-era ancestral homes, fish sauce industry, and that distinctive noodle dish pancit malabon.

Mirasol admits to being influenced by several foreign artists in his work as picture book illustrator, among whom were Edmund Dulac, Maurice Sendak, and Charles Santore. However, the fairy tale illustrations he did for Tahanan Books were decidedly similar in his rendering of figures and palette of earth colors to the art of the Russian illustrator Gennady Spirin. Surprisingly though, one among those who viewed MIrasol's exhibit of illustrations for the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen compared him, not to the illustrators previously mentioned, but to the American illustrator Maxfield Parrish, whose works Mirasol had never seen before. The fellow remarked that MIrasol is "the Philippines' own Maxfield Parrish."

MIrasol's paintings in the 1980s, although belonging to the social-realist school, with their angry tone and overt proletarian slant, were tempered somewhat with surrealist iconography. Images of levitating bodies, mutating forms, and incongruously juxtaposed objects were staples of his art then.

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. In the second round of judging to select the Grand Prize winner of the educational scholarship, where the three best entry winners were required to submit five more paintings each. Mirasol tied with Roberto Feleo for the prize.

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 has had three solo art shows, so far, once in 1988 at the Hiraya Gallery where he exhibited his political cartoons, and twice in 2001 and 2007 at the Crucible Gallery where he exhibited his picture book illustrations and paintings. He had also participated in twenty-three group art exhibits.

Mirasol still lives in Tondo, with wife Carina, and sons Brando de Niro and Karel Andrei. He is better known as Arnel Mirasol in the Philippine art and children's book circle.

(Below: books illustrated by Arnel Mirasol)