Daniel, or Dan to us, was CANVAS’ founding creative director. You will see his hand in nearly each of CANVAS’ children’s books from our very first one, Elias and His Trees to our latest winner of the Romeo Forbes Children’s Story Writing Competition, Daughter and the Great Fish, which would be his last. Doll Eyes, one of the many titles he designed for CANVAS, won the 2012 National Children’s Book Award. At every book launch, he would proudly announce to almost anyone he met “Ang cute ng book,‘no?! Ako designer niyan!” with a little a chortle.

In between designing books and art-directing for CANVAS, he also made time for his own personal artistic pursuits – as a children’s book illustrator and a painter. He illustrated Bugtong, Bugtong, two volumes of Filipino riddles (Tahanan Books, 1998 and 2013) and worked two years on the picture book Dalawa ang Daddy ni Billy, a story of two gay fathers raising a child (Tahanan Books, 2018).

Signing his works as Palma Tayona, Dan continued to join art exhibitions such as our annual Looking for Juan Outdoor Banner Project, to which his piece “Mela,” a pen and ink work on the origin story of the gumamela flower, was a contribution. CANVAS has kept this particularly striking work to be part of the Tumba-tumba Museum’s permanent collection.

Pintados was Daniel’s last one-man show, an online one via Marahuyo Gallery. He continued a series he started in 2011 – a portrait drawn from the childhood memory of his family’s help sweeping the floor with her heavily inked arms. Expanding on that image, his works became a narrative and homage to pintados, tattoed pre-Filipinos, on a ship bound for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

Daniel always had a curious spirit, eager for stories and their retellings – two reasons why he loved his home in Pasay City, where he could people-watch from his apartment window or go down to the streets to converse with community. These characters – random acquaintances or sometimes intimate friends – would eventually become voluptuous figures in his paintings.

Daniel Palma Tayona was a storyteller by design – through his paintings, illustrations, and creative eye. He was CANVAS’ creative director, our friend, Fafa Dan, and brother, already missed.