"Shining from the Slums"

2011.11.28 By Arnaldo Mirasol

SUPREMACY OF EVE

I celebrated my birthday last June. An occasion I decided to mark by coming out with this short narrative of my life. Don`t take the pompous title seriously, friends. I merely wanted to humor myself, to make me stand steadfast in my belief that what I`m doing with single-minded devotion for thirty years now is significant. Never mind if a very close relation consider me and my profession useless. But please read on- this piece is not an exercise in self-pity. On the contrary, hahaha...

I was born and raised in the slums of Tondo: at the so-called Tondo Foreshore, that bit of land that was originally sea. Despite the place`s notoriety as breeding-ground for would-be toughies, I will always remember my boyhood years with fondness. I had so much fun then romping about the flooded streets, trying to catch tadpoles and small fishes with improvised nets. Even the fistfights I engaged in with boyhood adversaries now seem to me like exciting fun-filled games. Despite being surrounded by a not-so good environment, we weren`t exactly destitute then like many of our neighbors, because my father, Edmundo, was already working overseas as a marine engineer.

Even before I started learning the alphabet, I was already teaching myself the rudiments of drawing. It was an innate obsession, a calling perhaps. When I was a kid, I never knew anyone who can draw, so nobody could have inspired or influenced me but I was already in to art.

I began working as a professional artist in 1981, when I got employed as political cartoonist for the newspaper, People`s Journal. At first, I did an editorial cartoon daily. But due perhaps to my rawness, I noticed as weeks went on that I`m being given fewer and fewer assignments. Since I`m being paid on a per piece basis, I thought it better to quit the job rather than go each day to the office with no assurance on income. After my short initial stint as political cartoonist, I decided to paint full-time after being inspired by a book on Dali. It was the declining years of the Marcos regime and many paintings being done and exhibited at that time were political in content. I rode the trend and painted social realist canvases, but with a surrealist twist. In 1984, I won the top prize in the First Metrobank Annual Painting Competition. It was a most prestigious competition then as it is at present. From then on, the saga of my art career began to flourish.

 

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