Reminiscences in Pastel Shades

 

Essay 10. REMINISCENCES IN PASTEL SHADES

(Exhibition notes I wrote for Mayu Solano's 2015 two-woman exhibit with Karen de Pano Picadizo at the Artologist Gallery. Top art critic Cid Reyes wrote the notes for that of Karen)

By Arnaldo B. Mirasol

"Happy Thoughts" is the title of MAYU SOLANO's collaborative show with Karen de Pano Picadizo at the Artologist Gallery. I remarked that their paintings must be of happy memories or events. Mayu agreed. She added that the happy events that are the subjects of her paintings are not necessarily memories of her childhood, but rather her recollections mostly of recent events in her life.

Although the movies and music are frequent sources of inspiration for her, Mayu confessed that she starts each painting with no definite motifs in mind yet. Her working method is impromptu. She begins by laying down on canvas the colors she likes until she sees on it the right combination of colors and form. It is only then that Mayu begins to delineate in greater detail the images that she thinks she sees on the canvas.

Toy balloons are recurrent motifs in Mayu's paintings, and candy-colored houses, too. Anime inspired characters, like the one-eyed creatures of her 2010 works, appeared in her paintings from time to time, which make it easy for us to guess who her influences were when it comes to art making. 

Mayu specifically mentioned the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara as one of her favorites. Nara is famous for his 'portraits' of cartoony characters with big menacing eyes. I mentioned Takashi Murakami, but Mayu said that she doesn't know of him. Well, Murakami is the founder of Superflat, a Japanese art movement that espouses the utilization of anime and Japanese kitsch imagery in paintings and sculptures. Takashi Murakami is Japan's own Jeff Koons, the American pop artist who inherited the mantle of pop art-stardom from Andy Warhol.

While Mayu's early works resemble the paintings of the Superflat artists, a shift had occurred lately in her style. Mayu had gravitated away from Superflat. The nuance may be indiscernible, but it is there. Her paintings can be categorized now as naif, or more to the point, as pop-naif, because she consciously adopted the child's way of limning forms and the pop artists' penchant for using loud colors and contemporary visual motifs.

The painting "I am Lost in the Sound of Separation, But we Will Play Again, Sarah" best exemplified pop-naif. The focal point in the painting, the girl holding a heart-shaped toy balloon---which is perhaps Sarah, or perhaps Mayu herself---was drawn in the way that any child untutored in art would draw it. The figure is also colored stridently which strongly suggested affinity with pop art. 

Sarah was Mayu's childhood friend. I gathered from Mayu's verbalizing on the nature of friendship that she and Sarah may have drifted away from each other many years ago, but have now reconciled, and even became comadres. Happy ending, that---which enables this painting to conform precisely with the theme of an exhibition on happy thoughts.

"You and Me", on the other hand, is a tribute to cats. Mayu belongs to that special breed of human beings who are so considerate and kind to animals that they treat their pets as family.

Kitty, Meow-meow, and Miki are the names of Mayu's cats. The cat on the lap of the girl in the painting is Sesire, Mayu's imaginary version of the Cheshire Cat character in "Alice in Wonderland". 

Let's hear it straight from Mayu: "Yung pusa po sa paintng, version ko sya ni Cheshire Cat sa Alice in Wonderland. Gusto ko yung character nya, whimsical, mysterious, hindi madaling madidiktahan yung nasa isip nya, pero naiintindihan nya yung nangyayari." (The cat in the painting is my version of Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. I like the cat's character, whimsical, mysterious, with a mind not easy to dictate to, but understands what is happening.)

Another happy painting, You and Me is a depiction of the tender bond that link the master, or mistress for that matter, to her cat. The pastel color scheme adds to the affectionate tone because pastels are the colors of endearment, and evoke memories of girlish crushes and the like.   

Mayu is a fine arts graduate from FEATI.  She grew up in Dasmarinas, Cavite where she and her family live up to now. After graduation, she tried her hand for a while in sales, when she handled a certain brand of arts material, She now paints full time, facilitates art workshops, and dabbles a bit in writing stories for children. She was also into performance when she was in school, being an ardent enthusiast of the art of theater and dance.

An artist as multifaceted as Mayu, may seem unfocused to some because of her myriad involvement in different disciplines. But that is not so in her case because we can see from her works that she managed to forge a link between painting and children's literature in the art she does---disciplines which occupies much of her time these days.

This fusion of painting and children's literature in Mayu's artworks may yet define her as an artist. She is not the first painter to tackle literary themes. I could cite several whose subject matters are drawn from books. There were, for example,  the Pre-Raphaelites from an earlier era, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt ---and Marcel Antonio, that brilliant contemporary artist who painted scenes from Shakespeare's plays, and even from Alice in Wonderland. 

Mayu's paintings are, by no means, as masterly as the paintings of the artists I mentioned. But they need not be, because her current style suits just fine the theme she loves to take up in her paintings, which are reminiscences in pastel shades of things past and charmingly girlish.