Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

He spent the rest of that year, 1959, discovering Lisbon by walking through its streets and lanes, talking to the people, sampling their food and wines and being Mario, a keen observer as well as a faithful recorder of the passing show doing some of his most ambitious drawings. He got to know Lisbon just as well as he knew Bombay or Panjim. And he drew, without having to worry about deadlines or indeed, the possibility of making money out of his pictures. He just let go and drew and polished or distorted and chopped away according to his fancy and thus succeeded in creating a unique recognizable style of his own.

Above all, that year in Lisbon, free to practice his art in his own way, enabled Mario Miranda to overcome a long held mental block: he discovered that he no longer needed to be taught anything about his art; he had gained confidence in himself, and wanted to go and try to live on his art in a competitive field. He had saved a little money in Lisbon and could have gone on to Paris if he wanted to. He went to London instead.

One of the factors in favour of London was that his sister Fatima lived in Belsize Park and he had somewhere to stay while he looked around for work. He began making good money doing cartoons for magazines and also TV advertisements. He supplied the figures and the television technicians gave them animation so they became figures in motion. He was also doing cartoons on a regular basis for a magazine called Lilliput.

Soon after he found regular work, he left his sister’s flat and began to live in Hampstead, “because that was the arty locality”.

“Frances Newton Souza was there,” he remembers and so was Abu, already well installed as a cartoonist with The Observer. “I met famous cartoonists such as Jak and Vicky Gyles and Ronald Searle”.

When Mario told Searle that he had been influenced by him and had tried to pattern himself after him, Searle told him that if he did so, he would be doing himself a disservice. “You have a gift; it is up to you to develop it. To try and copy someone else, no matter how good, is to put a curb on your own freedom as an artist.
You are good.You will find your own medium; your signature tune.”

So Mario went on doing things his own way and it was not long before he may be said to have been accorded the hallmark of recognition when Punch, the very flag bearer of humour magazines in the world at the time, published one of his cartoons.

Since that time Mario Miranda himself has become well-known in his profession. He has travelled widely and hobnobbed with many of the stars of his profession such as Oliphant, Schultz and Herblock. But Ronald Searle whom he had once held as his role model still remains his favourite cartoonist.