About the Cover Artwork and the Artist:

New Jersey-based Filipino miniature painter Gregory Ray Halili painted postage stamp-size recreations of the Fernando Amorsolo portraits of the UP Vargas Museum collection. It is this way of honoring artists that he admires. Having been used to working from imagination and photographs, this is Halili's first attempt at painting from a museum collection. These portraits are of Jorge B. Vargas, his first wife Marina, second wife Adelaida and three daughters Nena, Teresita and Lourdes. Prior to exhibiting them from August 11 to October 3, he spent one month in residence to study and recreate the Amorsolo portraits, the results of which were then exhibited next to these portraits. Halili is known for his colorful watercolors with fluttery winged butterflies painted on myriad fabrics, and for his tropical visionary landscapes of paradisiacal settings, all of miniature scale. In his last gallery exhibition at the Nancy Hoffman in New York City entitled Nostalgia, the artist painted a visual "love letter" to his country of birth, the Philippines.