The unfinished Maria | Gilda Cordero-Fernando

MARIA was patterned after Tingting’s daughter Liaa Cojuangco,
when she was a teenager. The artist had a crush on her and
clipped her photos from newspapers. Art by Antonio Mahilum

“Mariang Alimango is one of several Cinderella-type stories in Philippine literature. In the 1990s I wanted to make it into an illustrated children’s book in two languages, the Filipino part by Virgilio S. Almario, who has since become National Artist, and the English part by me.

I engaged a relatively unknown representational painter named Antonio Mahilum to do the illustrations, since I had seen his fantastic craftsmanship in a brochure. What he lacked in imagination, I thought cockily, I’d supply. The paintings were to be in oil, about 2 ½ x 2 ½ ft size canvases.

It had never been specified that Maria’s family was poor. Since GCF Books then was working on a “Philippine Ancestral Houses” book, I thought I’d give Maria a beautiful dwelling like the one we had photographed in Bustos, Bulacan.

Then I got more ambitious. I thought the book should also serve as a children’s primer on old houses. It would be useful also as a model for adult artists, who drew such awful bahay-na-bato as I often saw in weekend magazines.

Every object in Maria’s house was to be authentic to the period. Since Maria was treated like a servant, she had to be in the kitchen most of the time, so that, too, would be meticulously equipped.”

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