An “old man mad with painting”—that was what the Japanese called Hokusai, one of their greatest artists.
An “old man mad with painting”—that was what the Japanese called Hokusai, one of their greatest artists.
On his deathbed, at age 89, he declared: “If only Heaven will give me just another 10 years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”
The same undying passion animates Sofronio Ylanan Mendoza, better known by the initials with which he signs his works: Sym.
The Cebu-born painter celebrated his 83rd birthday last March 10 with an exhibit at the Mezzanine of the Makati Shangri-La Hotel, mounted by Hiraya Gallery. (The exhibit runs until March 27.)
Although he has slowed down considerably since his fourth angioplasty, after which his cardiologists decided to install a pacemaker, Sym’s heart still beats only for his art.
“Art still holds a lot of challenges,” he says in Tagalog, which still bears traces of a Cebuano accent despite the artist having lived in Manila since the 1960s, and Vancouver since the 1980s.
“There’s no end to it,” he adds.
High-fidelity
Often, he says, he closes his eyes just before going to sleep and his mind is suddenly filled with abstract shapes, very clear, in high-fidelity. Sometimes the flashes of inspiration come while he’s watching TV. But when he attempts to capture them on paper the next day, he always ends up with something quite different.
Perfect expression is always elusive and just beyond his grasp.
“Lately, in retrospect,” he continues, “I’ve been looking at all I’ve done, and there’s still something lacking. Not wrong, but lacking. I feel that my paintings are lacking in poetic expression—that’s what I want to achieve. I’m still searching for the technique that will allow me to achieve that expression.”
Maybe, in five years or so, he might try sculpture, he says with a smile.
Quiet corner
We are in the artist’s studio in a quiet corner of San Juan, which he shares with his wife Ely. The walls are hung with paintings from various stages of his career, some in the classical realist style which he favored early on, and some in the neo-cubist style which, counter-intuitively, he returned to in 2000.
“Now that my seven children are all grown, I’m free,” he says. “I can work anytime, anywhere, and we’ve decided to spend more time here than in Canada.”
Ely interrupts him momentarily to apply a transdermal patch, a sustained-release heart medication. After a while, Sym becomes more animated, although it’s hard to tell whether it’s the medication kicking in, or talking about art, that’s responsible.
Sym ushers us into his sunlit atelier, where two easels display recent canvases. More paintings lean against the walls, all in the style that he calls “new millennium cubism.”
At the height of his powers, he says, he could finish a four-by-six-foot painting in a mere four or five hours. Now, he says a bit ruefully, it sometimes takes him months to finish just one canvas.
It’s not just age and infirmity slowing him down, he hastens to add. His new works are much more complex and subtle and difficult to execute. He shows us sketchbooks full of preliminary drawings, sometimes indicating directional lines or with notations for colors.
His style of cubism, he says, retains an element of realism. Indeed, he still favors the classic themes: nudes, still lives, landscapes, but fractalized in prismatic colors and shapes, suggesting rhythmic movement and directionality.
“I try to incorporate shapes and harmony of colors,” he adds. “It takes science and knowledge, not just pure intuition. With abstract art, you can go by pure intuition, but with this, it takes planning. It’s like architecture. It’s easy to build a barung-barong, but a 50-story building—you need a plan.”
There was a time, when he was younger, when he would paint all day and into the wee hours of the morning.
“It’s as if you’re flying,” says Sym. “When you’re engrossed in painting, you lose track of time.”
These days, he says, he starts at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and makes it a point to knock off at midnight or 1 a.m.
But not a day goes by when he doesn’t pick up his brushes and pigments.
