How do we live? What do we do?
Umpteenth questions such as this stand mirrored and etched in the tableaux, fabliaux
and portraiture of Mario Miranda’s art. A vignette of the great cartoonist and
illustrator showcases the passions and desires of a bhatcaar, another sketch
reflects a speedy cameo packed with fisherwomen and the pedkars and the next portrays
a theatre bar in fashionable Paris. Mario
was a flaneur who keenly observed the teeming masses in the streets, living out
their drives and compulsions. A visual raconteur of everyday life, of the way
it was, the influences, pressures and pulls of an evolving society, Mario
sketched lifetimes of people and nations at home and abroad; visiting 22
countries from Portugal to Brazil, Japan, Israel, France.......
Mario’s art
is a potpourri of exact realism, poetic myth, perception and gaiety. It is kind but unsentimental, mocking but not
cynical, profoundly cosmopolitan but distinctively individual. The substantial
human nature embodied in his art holds the viewer enthralled. An innate sense of irony coupled with a
complete absence of pomposity and pretence is what makes Mario a wonderful
artist. The compositions frame the world
of credible human beings, amazingly diverse and varied. He
intersperses his sketches with brush strokes of colour, bringing alive the
atmosphere of his locales, foibles of people and quintessential tidbits of a
region. Structures and animals
and other inanimate objects fill the gaps, resonating and completing the
picture. Sometimes we are thrilled to spot Mario himself in one of his crowded
cartoons – an Alfred Hitchcockan imposition.
Mario’s text and images in the
books - Laugh it off, Goa with Love, Germany in Wintertime- read like a graphic novel, with the pictures prima
focus and words merely accentuating that which is so explicit in the drawings.
Pocket cartoons and the editorial art in Times of India, The Economist, The
Illustrated Weekly of India (and many more publications) which pulled at the
heartstrings of the public( Miss Fonseca and the Boss, Bundaldass and Moon
Swamy) cannot just be left at the
doorstep of an ephemeral register. Highbrow creative art with a mass following,
can take on heavyweights like Goya, Hogarth and Daumier, says the cultural
theorist Ranjit Hoskote. What Eugene Atget and Garry Winogrand did in street
photography, Mario delivered in everyday caricaturist art in the daily media. RK Narayan’s short story servings of composite
small town life archived in his ‘Malgudi’ stories is a verbalization of what
Mario paralleled in his drawings. It’s a blessing that his creativity was
shared and revelled in by a mass population rather than being barred behind
gallery walls witnessed by a niche elitist audience.
Whether he was pub crawling with
F. Souza or Dom Moraes in London or rubbing shoulders with Charles Shulz and
Herblock in the US or was on an assignment with Manohar Malgonkar and Khushwant
Singh in Goa, he had no pretentions to ideology or intellectual attitudes said
Nissim Ezekiel. Mild-tempered,
unassuming and modest, he became the toast of every occasion. His grounding in a multicultural, multiethnic
milieu of Bombay and Goa with far-reaching influences from Arabia, Portugal,
East Africa, Latin America and Europe had stretched the contours of his mind
and heart to a horizon far from the narrow domestic walls of closed communities.
With a flourish, his irreverent lines would give form to a striptease, a buxom
dancer in a Parisian bar or a traditional Parsi family in Dhobi Talao . The
pariah in a community hall in Jerusalem or the maverick in a Japanese party would
find their way unresistingly into his works. Animals abound in his drawings of
street scenes and village life. Domesticated
turtles, roosters, squirrels, dogs and cats moved uninhibited in his dwellings.
But like Charles Shulz’s beagle ‘Spike’,
he too was inclined more towards dogs and they appeared abundantly in his
cartoons.
The playfield between the private
and public environments of people sets up multifarious dialogue in his
cartoons. “Chogm and Four Lane Space for Grand Prix in Goa” are cartoons personifying
strife in his public private space. His leanings
more towards a social chronicle rather than political statements taxonomically
categorize his work as soft anthropology. Fisherwomen with sweet smelling
‘Zaois’ adorning their hair, students at Oxford with yellow, red trailing hair
strands crisscrossing lush-green lawns
or crowded watering holes across
the world bring the viewer upfront with the nuances of life lived around the
next city corner. The meticulous
detailing gives many a ‘aha’ moments to the viewer who cannot but be awed by
the wealth of psychological information in a mere gesture or stance captured by
the artist skilfully with his pen nib. His
is the exuberant image, ebullient with energy and movement. He captures the absurd in every situation,
looks through the pretensions and masks and renders us egoless. His compositions fill the viewer with verve,
mirth and chuckles galore!
Recording and freezing
slices of life through his strokes and lines, he perpetuated profound truths in
the garb of humour. The satire and irony clothed in the comical finds its mark
but loses its sting and does not impinge anyone including the victims. A cartoon like a short story is, after all,
not a transcription of life but a dramatization of it. In the familiar and the real, a skilful
artist weaves vivid and dramatic threads to transform the banal, clichéd and
formulaic reality into a potent picture. Mario’s art then becomes a meaningful exercise,
a ride through the unknown, yet known realms of the human condition.
A Pocketful of Chuckles, the
largest exhibition of Mario Miranda’s original artwork is on at Gitanjali
Gallery Fontainhas , Goa. Compilations
of his drawings through 56 years of artistic journey have been collected and
classified by the Architecture Autonomous - Gerard De Cunha – A labour of love
and tribute to the great Goan artist on his 90th anniversary. A book in a series, “Life of Mario-1949” too
was launched on this occasion. Google
doodle by the doodler Aaron Renier reminded us fondly about the quintessential art
form of the one and only Mario Miranda.
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