Those who seek an explanation for the Cebuano's gift for design can do worse that meet the world's lone butterfly artist. He knows a thing or two about drawing art from nature.

"As a child," Julian Jumalon says, "I loved fairy tales." One might be forgiven for thinking that Professor Jumalon is living in one right now. At 87, he has won international fame for the second time in his life, and outstanding distinction in each of his three careers. Or is it four already?

A distinguished university professor of 28 years, Jumalon is internationally renowned for his scientific research on butterflies; he is also the proud father of eight children, all of them accomplished in their own fields. But it is in his belated career as a butterfly artist that he has truly captured the imagination of many people the world over. He is probably the only artist in the world who "makes" paintings out of discarded butterfly wings.

His love affair with butterflies started almost 70 years ago, in appropriate fairy-tale fashion: in 1928, a high-school sophomore, he found himself unexpectedly witnessing a butterfly migration.

"All of a sudden, [there were these] thousands of butterflies; it seemed supernatural," he recalls now. Something fairy tale-like, too, subsists in the wonder, the wide-eyed fascination, that he felt at that moment; it has lasted ever since. Indeed, one might even say it had acquired a life of its own.

Professor Jumalon studied the fine arts, but he first won renown for his work--okay, his moonlighting as a lepidopterist." I am a diurnal collector," he says, to distinguish himself, somewhat enviously, from those who collect butterflies at night. (With 1,500 known butterfly species in the Philippines-- versus some 750 in the United States and about 400 in Europe--the only butterfly specialist in the country understandably itches to continue the work of collecting even nocturnally). He started collecting in Cebu, in what is now Mango Avenue, soon after the brush with the butterfly migrants. He has since gone on countless collecting expeditions (Donald Davies of the Smithsonian took the photograph of Professor Jumalon atop Mount Apo, the highest peak in the Philippines, way back in 1965; "it was so cold," Jumalon remembers now). He is scheduled to undertake another expedition soon, this time to the island of Siquijor. In time, his home in Basak, Cebu may attract expeditions in its own right.