SYM MENDOZA: The Power and Beauty of a Dream
The sweet success of the master painter Sofronio Y. Mendoza or more popularly known in the art circle as simply SYM lies in the struggling voyage he had to take to become a full-fledged artist.
And he tells his story in between laughter, punctuates it with comical anecdotes, and narrates it with such optimism that it is very hard to believe SYM was once a poor young boy in Cebu, with big talent and dreams mind you, who journeyed to Manila alongside pigs in a ship—with only two pieces of clothing, some charcoal drawings and pencils, a drawing pad, a magazine in his cogon-made bag and pocket money of only R5 that he had managed to scrape from the contributions of his relatives—to study art.
It didn’t matter that he had no place to live in the foreign city or that he didn’t know a thing about Manila, how to navigate its tricky streets even. None of those basic things mattered except SYM’s raging passion and overwhelming desire to paint and to triumph in it.
Turning 77 on March 11, SYM is only glad to share with me his humble beginnings, especially the mind-blowing hardships he had suffered in order to pursue what he loves best. Looking back, he says that he finds his story kind of ridiculous when you ponder about it, as parts of his journey include him sleeping for a time in marble benches across the Manila Hotel, eating only a meal a day and satiating his hunger with doses of water because he had no money to buy food, having to go to a public toilet every day because there were no private bathrooms in the place he was allowed to stay, and sleeping in the topmost bunk of a triple-decker only to be constantly awakened by the loud creaking of the bed due to his fellow artists’ “sexual indiscretions.”
“Matatawa ka sa istorya ko (You’ll laugh at my stories),” SYM says. And he’s quite right. There were definitely moments in our conversation where we would end up cracking up about his experiences. He would burst out laughing in the middle of a sentence with such ease. It’s amazing to just listen to him and his tales, as if he was not really a painter whose works are revered and sought after in and out of the country but a captivating storyteller and a sage whose wisdom never runs dry.
It is not only wisdom, however, that SYM never runs out of. The realist-turned-abstractionist is brimming with imagination, inspiration, spirit, and knowledge that have guided his artistic career into fruition. Although his name is synonymous with realist and impressionistic pieces that bring to life in oils on canvases street scenes and landscapes in the Philippines, and later on, flowering gardens and vistas in Canada, SYM’s repertoire for the past years have taken in them a refreshing twist towards cubism.
SYM’s conscious decision to dabble into another art genre came after he and his wife had finished sending all their children to school or as SYM amusingly puts it, “when my children had already begun working and taking home paychecks bigger than mine.” He continues, “I told my wife Ely that it’s time that I shift to abstract. I went into cubism because I’ve always loved it even when I was still a student, admiring works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. I told myself that if you’re already skilled with the basics, you only need to learn [cubism’s] philosophy and principles. Only then will you be able to take off, and your technique will do the rest. I also told myself that it’s high time for me to evolve.”
SYM shares that since he didn’t have formal training with abstraction, he made sure he has learned everything the genre has to offer to his expression. In fact, one can find numerous sketches and meticulously-done studies paired with notes and insights on art in SYM’s San Juan atelier, proof of the painter’s continuous studying and perpetual hunger for knowledge, which he adamantly insists is the key if one is in the attempt to be the best and perfect his or her craft.
But the change in SYM’s painterly expression style-wise is, let’s say, can only be seen in the surface, which is really to say that the painter’s innate sense of feeling, his emotions, and his statements when he was still painting realistically have remained palpable and ever so present in his new suite of neo-cubist works. Central to SYM’s abstract repertoire is still the recurring motifs seen and loved in his older canvases such as fruits, vegetables, blooms, stills, and a human figure here and there.
What SYM does is to include these representational, real motifs of everyday life and deconstruct them. In turn, SYM’s works can also be viewed as a hybrid of realism and cubism. Realist elements are still present in his pieces, making them not entirely non-objective art. Meanwhile, though, one cannot be mistaken as to classify SYM’s brightly-hued and dynamic opuses as cubist because of the broken up objects and subjects, surfaces crisscrossing at random angles and lines moving here and there, background overlapping with objects and planes, creating an illusion of one ambiguous, indefinite space.
“I think what I do is still part-realism but it’s based more on my imagination and visualization of things. I still draw and paint in the realist fashion, though, because it’s a necessary exercise and practice,” he tells.
There were some who were instantly apprehensive of SYM’s sudden change of artistic course. Others perhaps saw this move totally preposterous and sort of suicidal in a way. “Why not stick with his old works, opuses that he has been widely recognized for?”, “Is he crazy?” and “Why would he waste his talent in drawing?” are just some questions that must have ran inside people’s heads back in the day regarding SYM’s decision.
To which SYM answers with conviction: “We only exit once in this planet, even in a billion years, we will not come back. And it is my privilege to change myself. I will use that privilege.”
This makes me see SYM as someone who will do everything deliberately and with great and ambitious intent to achieve goals, someone who is in constant search for the higher level, and a deeper purpose in life and in art.
He’s a man who’s willing to try everything, thinking perhaps, in poet Charles Bukowski’s words, “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery… All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” - Article courtesy of Manila Bulletin
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