ON MULTIPLICITY OF STYLES BY : ARNALDO MIRASOL

ON MULTIPLICITY OF STYLES

By Arnaldo Mirasol

My painting “Bloody Mary”, clearly shows the stylistic gulf separating my current artworks from those I did in the 1980s up to the year 2007. A high school classmate 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 more than thirty years.

I had a varied art career. My first professional works were paintings belonging to the social realist school, but with a surrealist twist a la Dali. I was an editorial cartoonist for several years, and then textbook illustrator where I put my knack for cartooning and caricatures to good use. It was when I became a picture book illustrator that I can truly say that I’ve exhausted the limits of realism. My fairy tale illustrations were packed with minute details rendered in true “kutkutan” fashion. I eventually grew tired of that style, especially after a fellow painter described me as obsessive-compulsive and his writer-wife in turn predicted that I won’t get rich because of the excessively long time I take to finish an illustration. Thus, I changed style.

I’m not the only one who did. I could cite the names of numerous painters whose bodies of works would reveal several stylistic changes. Pablo Picasso was 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 when he came out with paintings comparable to the mature works of the leader of the French Realist School, Gustave Courbet.

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, Picasso came out with the landmark painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” which was to become the prototype for Cubism. He next came up with his Neo-classical series, where the figures this time are 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 in rapid succession more paintings of different styles that art historians find hard to label or classify.

Another painter who have trekked the style spectrum, so to speak, was the surrealist Salvador Dali who started out as an impressionist. With the advent of cubism, he promptly did paintings thatmimicked closely Picasso’s. He also did minimalist mixed-media abstracts when abstraction was in vogue, and even an abstract-expressionist work where he used an improvised grenade in lieu of brushes, with nails as shrapnel. When this so-called “apocalyptic granate” was detonated, the nails embedded themselves on the surface of copper plates leaving nail marks all over. Prints were made on paper using these copper plates which Dali afterwards jazzed up with an image of the Pieta and other adornments on the border using watercolor.

When Dali 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 paintings, showed a resurgent concern with correct anatomy. His last painting was a return to the minimalism of his youth, and just depicted lines resembling an outline of the tail of a bird and a motif or two from a violin.

Other artists who’ve switched or used simultaneously different painting styles in the course of their career were, to name a few among the foreign painters, Camille Pissaro, George Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Stanley Spencer. Filipino artists who did the same were Nena Saguil, Alfredo Roces, Hernando Ocampo, Jerry Navarro, Prudencio Lamarrosa, Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, David Medalla, Santiago Bose, and Bencab, among others. Vicente Manansala, who was the first proponent of cubism here didn’t start out as a cubist. His earlier works were heavily influenced by Botong Francisco.

So you see, switching styles doesn’t really diminished a painter. True, an artist who changes styles often might just be the impressionable type, or one who is easily influenced by anything he regards as superior --- which I confess I sometimes am. But the opposite could in fact be truer, because that can also be a mark of versatility, or even ingenuity. It might actually be just a manifestation of the artist’ restless spirit and fondness for novelty and experimentation.