Mario Miranda - Fine Art Cartoons

This is my favourite Mario Miranda sketch - we bought a print of this from Panjim during our first visit to Goa

Mário João Carlos do Rosário de Brito Miranda or Mario Miranda was one of  India's best-known cartoonists and illustrators. At the height of his creativity and popularity in the 1970s and 80s, Mario's work was ubiquitous - appearing in textbooks, calendars, murals and magazines.

Goa: Mario's warm-hearted, often comic drawings of local characters and culture helped to popularise his native state of Goa, both across India and overseas. The diaries he maintained from the age of 10, are virtually the rarest of visual chronicles of colonial Portuguese Goa, capturing life in those changing times.

Mumbai: Though born in Goa, Mario, as he was popularly known, spent his youth shuttling between Mumbai and Goa. He worked as a cartoonist in newspapers like the now-defunct Current and later with the Illustrated Weekly of India magazine, besides Midday and later, Economic Times. The Afternoon Dispatch and Courier produced some of his best work on the city. "Mumbai, seen through Mario Miranda's eyes, is at one level cosmopolitan, symbolising the good things in life, and at another level, a nightmare with its acute space crunch and sundry other civic woes" says Gerard da Cunha, curator of the artist's work. In 2005, Mr da Cunha began to work on a book on the artist, and tracked down some 13,000 drawings - just 30% of his work- from myriad sources, including Mario's friends, personal collections, publications, and the Mumbai murals that had survived. I fondly remember the ones at Cafe Mondegar in town (Colaba) where I have had a few beer breakfasts for utara.

Cafe Mondegar, Colaba

Office series: Mario's unforgettable characters including the Boss and Miss Fonseca still charm us today. Personally I think they are better than Dilbert. They remind me of the Bombay of Amol Palekar's movie 'Choti si baat'

Travels: Mario travelled to 22 countries, where he was invited to visit and sketch. Artwork from his travels are "a treasure trove of situations, cities and characters".

Mr da Cunha says Mario was a "versatile" artist. "Though the artists' community did not consider Mario to be one of them, it did not affect his creative urges, which found expressions in colour, pen-and-ink and charcoal. His range of styles, and command over different mediums, made him a bit of an enigma. Ironically, it was the cartoonist/illustrator's tag that stuck, limiting people's appreciation to 'just a few laffs'."

Mario consciously avoided political cartooning, but his role as a social cartoonist is unmistakable, points out Mr da Cunha. Mr da Cunha believes though that though Mario gained huge popularity during his lifetime, his true genius is yet to be recognised.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36220327