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

Ed Hardy - Tattooed Fine Art

Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier clothes were all the rage in India the early 2000’s thanks to the macho men of Bollywood - Salman Khan, Sanjay Dutt and their ilk. I must admit that since then I have been besotted by these garish / kitschy designs, especially the famous tiger tattoo design. At the time I had no idea who Ed Hardy or Christian Audigier were. I think what attracted me to these designs were the allure of wearing a cool tattoo without the pain and needles. I hate injections… no way I could muster the courage to get a tattoo!

The proliferation in the early 2000s of wildly colourful clothing adorned with screaming skulls, tiger heads, hearts, and roses made the name Ed Hardy shorthand for kitsch. However, by the time he licensed his art to brands—most prominently Christian Audigier—Don Ed Hardy had already had an influential career in tattooing which helped elevate the art into American popular culture. Although the rhinestone hats and shirts that mimicked tattoo sleeves were much different from his custom work for decades of clients, their desirability reflected how Hardy had promoted tattooing beyond subculture.

Don Ed Hardy

A Southern California native born in 1945, Don Ed Hardy revived a childhood determination to become a tattoo artist and underwent a tattoo apprenticeship while simultaneously receiving a B.F.A. degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. Tattooing professionally since then, he developed the fine art potential of the medium with emphasis on its Asian heritage. In 1973 he lived in Japan, studying with a traditional tattoo master – the first non-Asian to gain access to that world. He resumed these studies in Japan throughout the 1980s. Since 1974 he pioneered the emphasis on unique tattoo commissions at his San Francisco studio.

In 1982 he and his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, formed Hardy Marks Publications and have written, edited and published over twenty-five books on alternative art. They moved their primary household to Honolulu in 1987, where Hardy resumed painting, drawing, and printmaking. He maintains the studio Tattoo City in San Francisco, with younger artists continuing to evolve and carry on his unique work format. Hardy’s primary focus is on creating and exhibiting works in more traditional mediums, including porcelain painting. He began developing this body of work in 2006 in a traditional Japanese setting.

Ed Harry’s name has since been reduced to the rhinestone-emblazoned emblem of L.A. excess. For that you can thank marketing shark Christian Audigier, an L.A.-based French entrepreneur who first brought the world Von Dutch trucker hats, then licensed Hardy’s name in 2004. He soon opened a flagship clothing store on Melrose, eventually stamping everything from guitar picks to tanning lotion with Ed Hardy designs. He boosted visibility and sales by dressing his famous friends in the brand; 50 Cent once played his birthday party and, in 2007, Kim Kardashian West appeared on his runway. Audigier sold the line in 2011 for an astonishing $62 million.

Hardy wasn’t a fan of Audigier, once describing him as the “ground zero of everything wrong with contemporary culture,” but the lucrative deal allowed him time off to paint, even as his street cred dwindled—along with, allegedly, his cut of the profits. In 2009, Hardy filed a $100 million lawsuit accusing Audigier of underreporting sales and manipulating his imagery in violation of the terms of their contract. The parties reached a settlement, and Hardy has since partnered with another company to reboot his brand overseas, particularly in Asia.

Despite its tarnished legacy, Ed Hardy could once be spotted on the highest echelon of celebrities. A whole plethora of A-list stars matched their fake tans and flared jeans to Hardy's t-shirts, including Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Adrien Brody, and Jessica Alba. These high-profile names no doubt helped lift the Hardy label to iconic status. But what goes up must come down, and now only photos exist to remind us of this skull-studded moment.

Personally I still love the brand - I have a cap with the tiger, a bottle of cologne, an iPad cover and a very questionable pair of jeans with black panthers embroidered on the backside - ha!

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Here are a few of my favourite designs:

The Roaring Tiger 🐯 

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