Marriage of the Real and the Unreal: Inspiration Through the Artwork of Januz Miralles

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It’s difficult to find out many personal details about Philippines based artist Januz Miralles, who goes by the nickname Nuestra, but it isn’t difficult to find Miralles’s artwork online and it’s even easier to fall in love with it. 

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Miralles is a multimedia artist, who often takes photographs of his subjects and then manipulates the image further through paint, a pen or a combination of many other means. The results? A beautiful and sometimes chilling marriage between the real and unreal. 

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Though it may appear at first overwhelming, Miralles work is full of recognizable details and emotion, communicated through color, texture, and often the human face or human body.

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After looking at Miralles’s artwork, your task, poet, is to marry the real and unreal with language. 

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My first suggestion is to look at any of his works and try to articulate what his human subjects must be feeling or thinking based on their visual state.

For example, this person could be overwhelmed, but we know not violently so, given the gentle neutral and peachy tones of their mind. Maybe they are sick, or lost in soft thoughts unattainable in their real world.

If just looking at the images isn’t inspiring you enough, here’s a few more suggestions:

Think of a familiar object in your house, or a person familiar to you. Picture the item or the person in the setting you usually see them. Now, take that item or person and imagine them somewhere unreachable by physical means.
For example, what would the candle on your bookshelf look like if it were in a nightmare, your only source of light as you navigated a labyrinth with speaking walls? How would the candle look in different in a pink, dusty dream setting? Down the rabbit hole, now in Alice’s hands as her vision ricocheted from purple to emerald and back? 

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And if this is too opened ended for your liking, write a poem that includes the following:

1. A facial feature (cupid’s bow, eyelashes, jawline)
2. A texture (gritty, embossed, frothy, honeyed)
3. A dominant color to frame the poem. Feel free to personify it. In this blending of worlds, pink can laugh through windows loud enough to wake you. Grey can melt naked into soft streets like exhausted lovers onto satin sheets.
   

Visit Januz’s website here for more original works, to find prints available for purchase, and contact information.

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