Introduction

- Gerard da Cunha

I signed with Habiba and Mario to do this book in November 2005 and it’s been a long time in coming out. Mario gave me quite a number of wonderful drawings which would have made a good book by itself, but I wanted to do something much more serious. It had to be something more worthy of the magnificent variety in his vast body of work. Work that has delighted both the common man and the connoisseur for more than half a century.

I began a search for Mario’s work from every possible source - from childhood friends, collectors, Mario himself, begging, cajoling and making a general nuisance of myself.

It took the editor Bevinda Collaco and myself about a year to amass an archive of about 8000 scanned drawings beginning with Mario’s childhood sketches, encompassing all his major phases, writings by and on him and also the objets d’art that have been spawned by his work.

I was ecstatic with the 25 volumes of material I collected, but was completely lost in the vastness of Mario’s world, incapable of making a choice or organizing the book. This period lasted four months and then in a three-week frenzy, I managed to put it all together.

Mario is very versatile and comfortable working definitively in different styles and media.

He has too, a unique sense of composition. Unfortunately the “cartoonist” avatar of Mario has been supreme in the public eye and has prevented the recognition of him as a great artist. Yet he holds in thrall art aficionados of the world who have invited him to draw and hold exhibitions in 22 countries.

I present Mario Miranda to the world.