Using ostrich eggs as her oval canvas, industrial designer Lilianna Manahan serves up a scrambled basket in her upcoming show, Omelette. But beneath the shell, Jay Abastillas finds nothing light  or  fluffy

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the kings horses, and all the king’s men, were shocked to see Humpty in color—put together again.

Humpty had some help, of course. And the king’s horse-drawn entourage can’t hold a candle to the shell-shocking talent and sublime styling of Lilianna Manahan. In her Silverlens exhibit, Omelette, the 24-year-old industrial designer has taken a crack—so to speak—at non-traditional art by using ostrich eggs as her curvy, oval canvas; painting delightful pieces of old-fangled whimsy to disarm even the most discerning critics.

One of her designs illustrates an idyllic scene at a park, with lush greens, little children, and, straight out of a Sendak storybook, an ominous creature lurking beneath the grass. 

Fairytales and fantasies often have a way of ingraining themselves in us. We often revert back to childhood stories of enchantment and magic whenever we feel depressed or drained by the drudgeries of reality. Escapism? Maybe not. To this young artist, the world she inhabits is viewed from a particularly idiosyncratic P.O.V.: inexplicable awe.

Animated, outdoorsy, and witty, Manahan is nothing of the brooding, self-absorbed, anti-social artists that pop culture so often caricatures. In fact, she surfs, plays football, travels the world, and comes back kicking, with more tales and legends to impart through her craft.

“I just like painting my stories and experiences, in the very way I saw them,” explains the Industrial Design graduate of the U.P. College of Fine Arts, who also took a two-year course at Central Saint Martins in London. Born to a family of artists, she has been painting on eggs for years—and is “getting better at it.” She uses a combination of watercolor, plaster, metals, papers, and even Photoshop to create these singular models of elliptical beauty.

Manahan’s designs exemplify her entirety as a person. One must realize that her use of a tiny canvas—while envisioning elaborate colors and arrangements on them—entails a whole lot of imaginative flair. The childlike patterns and eye-popping symbols actually mask the profundity and intricacy of the deft skill she wields.

One of her designs illustrates an idyllic scene at a park, with lush greens, little children, and, straight out of a Sendak storybook, an ominous creature lurking beneath the grass. “You know how it is, when things just randomly appear in your head? Like one day, I was walking in the park and I was thinking, what would it be like if suddenly, out of nowhere, a monster popped out the ground?”

Of limitless imagination, her notions and ideas go “anywhere and everywhere,” but the end product is always graphic and picturesque. Besides drawing inspiration from her travels and random thoughts, she also looks up to Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Banksy, and Marcel Wanders, proving further the diversity from which she bases her works.

She works with a feverish passion hard to match, painting seven hours a day to perfect her work. “I get very fussy,” she says. “It has to be exactly how I see it in my head.” With the complexity of her designs, it’s no wonder that it takes a week or so to complete a single egg. 

Manahan says she will eventually move on to product design, tackling textiles and furniture, while still adding her own personal touch to her creations. “I love what I do, and I’ll keep on doing it,” she says. “I just don’t want to be known as The Egg Girl.”

Omelette opens on October 21 at Silverlens’ 20Square Gallery /  http://www.silverlens.com