-= NMSU PANORAMA - Summer 2005 =- Visions of the Soul

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Visions of the Soul

By Duncan Hayse '01'02

Intense colors and shapes seen behind damaged eyes provide inspiration for blind artist

"I'm painting how I see," says George Mendoza, whose artwork is gaining international attention.

After graduating from New Mexico State University in 1979, George Mendoza became a world record holder in track - an unlikely accomplishment for a person who is almost completely blind.

These days, Mendoza is finding success in an even more contradictory career: painting.

Because of rare genetic illness, Mendoza began to lose his eyesight in 1970, finally retaining only a limited amount of his peripheral vision. He was 15 at the time, living in New York, but his mother, who had relatives living in southern New Mexico, decided to bring her son to Las Cruces. She remembered the quality of the desert light and hoped that the abundant sunshine would help him better use the limited peripheral vision he had remaining.

Mendoza attended the New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped in Alamogordo, where he discovered that he enjoyed running. (As a sighted person, Mendoza had been a gifted athlete and a star player on his high school basketball team.)

Later, training with the Aggie track team, he became an even stronger distance runner, skilled enough that he was invited to attend the Olympics for the Physically Disabled in 1976. During the next 12 years he ran races and won medals at track meets all over the world, including repeat appearances at the Olympics for the Physically Disabled in 1980 and 1984. His life story was detailed in a 1992 book, Running Toward the Light.

Mendoza says his first urges to paint came during his running career. He recalls running a race in the late 1980s over Baylor Pass in the Organ Mountains where, he says, "I was surrounded by butterflies. I guess they were migrating down to Mexico." Then dreams came of butterflies, "big butterfly eyes, butterflies with eyes on the wings." He says he began "to dabble in paints and colors." He took several art classes and after that, "I just went full go. One painting led to another and before I knew it I had concepts left and right."

In the years since, his paintings have been exhibited internationally and he has become recognized as a gifted artist whose canvases celebrate emotional and spiritual life in a context of desert light, sun and landscapes. Mendoza was chosen to be the featured artist in an exhibit scheduled to open in August at the International Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas. The exhibit, "Visions of the Soul," also will show the works of other visually impaired artists from the United States and Mexico.

Mendoza points to his dreams and visions, which he describes as "pinwheels and these fiery suns and these eyes looking at me," as what motivates him to paint. He recalls especially the words of a priest at the Holy Cross Retreat in Las Cruces when Mendoza went to him seeking advice about how to cope with the intense and powerful images. The priest said, "Go paint them."

"Painting is almost a moral obligation," he says. "I have to show the world this is how I see. Ironically, I'm painting how I see. A lot of this stuff I see in my dreams and in my walks are actually things I see physically. I see a lot of colors that don't belong in the real world. On top of a bush I'll see red, yellow, orange. The hill I just walked up and the shadow I just saw, I'll see the hill as raw sienna and I'll see the shadow as black, purple and red. But all of it has become very interesting stuff for paintings."

Other concepts for paintings come to him from other people, as if they are questions he must find an answer to. In his teens, Mendoza attended a camp for the blind where another camper, a young girl, asked him, "What color is the wind?" "The girl," he says, "had never seen the wind, never seen the color green, never seen the shape of a tree. I couldn't tell her there's no color. So I told her it's a rainbow." Her question haunted Mendoza and many years later, he says, "I created this painting with a rainbow and the canary yellow swirls going through the rainbow in the sky, in the sun, and that was my answer to her."

The physical energy that Mendoza once unleashed on competitive running is now a part of his artistic process. "I attack a painting, I destroy brushes because I don't paint little by little. I use wide strokes. People say my paintings flow, that there's a lot of movement in them."

Mendoza also introduces what he calls large print paintings. "Kind of like for the blind, you know, because I grew up with large print type." This concept is successful for him because, as he acknowledges, he can't compete against other artists in reproducing detail, but he can focus on an object up close. This close focus results in vivid paintings of objects that contain his distinctive sense of motion, color and emotion.

Being a blind painter allows Mendoza unique perspectives. "Sight is a distraction, because a painter is going to be compelled to paint all the details, whereas I can take these concepts that I start a painting with and - because I know the colors - I can put emotion in it. Painting becomes a very hands-on experience, versus visual, for me," he says.

"Think about it," he says, "the couple of things I've done in my life, running and painting, are two things that blind people don't do. The running, I was an athlete before I lost my sight and I just followed up. The painting, it came to me. It just started and it's never stopped in 10 years. I honestly believe the visions, the dreams, the thoughts are limitless and I just follow."

To see more of George Mendoza's art, visit www.georgemendoza.com

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