At the Loveland Art Museum Aug. 26 – Oct. 15, 2006
The Loveland Museum/Gallery will Exhibit thirty-two of my paintings. Keep
an eye on VisionofTheSoul.org for information about this show, and many
more to come.
Ironically, even though I am blind, I paint what I see. When I started
having this eye problem, I was upset with these visions, the dazzling
colors. I talked to a priest out at the Holy Cross Retreat House. He
said, “Paint them. Make designs, pictures out of them.” This
happened way back in the 70s. I never jumped on his advice because I was
too busy with the Olympics. I was running 100 miles a week, so I was
physically tired. It wasn’t until about seven years ago when I went
through my divorce that, well, a couple of things happened. I got a flier
for the American Printing House for the Blind to enter this art contest, so
that’s where I did that painting “Butterfly Eyes.” From
there on in, that’s when I realized, “This is what I want to
do for the rest of my life.” I’m not so worried about making
a living from it because this house is paid for and I don’t have
too many expenses. I’m more interested in pursuing that visionary
landscape that I see. It’s with me the minute I wake up, with me
all day long if I want to focus on it and pick out a painting out there
in the trees or sky that I see. Close my eyes, I can see a painting.
The other day I was in art class and the teachers were asking me, “What is it? What are you painting?” The painting was called “A Ray of Hope” and it’s in a sea of purple swirls. The sun is going through it. Sometimes my paintings are about what’s off the canvas. The sun may be way off the canvas, and I’ll just do the ray coming down through that in a circle of the gray/purple swirls. I started to do that because a lot of my paintings would focus on the canvas. Now I’ve reversed it. What would be way out there, how can I bring that in to the canvas—what would the tail look like?
A lot of my paintings are based on dreams that I’ve had. So I might have limited eyesight, but the visions or mental pictures that I see seem to be limitless. I’ve pursued not the perfect sunset, not the perfect yucca or autumn tree in New England. I pursue what I see. The paintings aren’t perfect because I can’t see detail. I’ve heard that some famous painters have left paintings unfinished. Was it Francisco Goya? He was really hard on himself because he always tried to finish a painting and over killed it, then realized, “I’m just going to leave them unfinished,” even though they were very much finished, much more than I can do. But I can go on and on, outlining… Sooner or later, I just stop. I usually stop when I can’t see anymore. My pupils are widened, all this light floods in, there’s a feeling or sensation, and everything becomes whitewashed and I just stop. I just leave it alone for awhile. Some paintings I leave alone for up to a year and don’t go back to.
I pick a lot of titles from pop songs. I find music very relaxing, I guess growing up in the sixties. I have a painting called “Far Away Eyes” from the Rolling Stones song. It has nothing to do with the song, just the title is so beautiful to me. I feel like my eyes are far away, they’re not based in reality. They don’t look across the street and see the neighbor’s house, or at the street and see trash. Sometimes people will say, “This place is ugly.” I don’t see it! To me, the world is beautiful. What makes it ugly is when you focus on ugliness, when you accept the focus offered by the rest of society. Turn on the news and 75 people have been killed in a car bombing in Iraq. I remember on one road trip, Estella telling me there were a bunch of prisoners in those orange suits, cleaning the highway. All I could see from the corner of my eye were the yellow poppies growing there. So that’s how I see the world.
If you and I were to switch eyeballs, you'd lose your mind. I do not have any central vision, and only a little bit of peripheral vision. But I have something weird on top of it all, these dazzling colors and lights, which are with me day and night. It’s actually worse at night when it’s dark because the lights get brighter. That’s why I like painting, writing, or running because that movement allows me not to focus on those brilliant colors or spots.
Once in a awhile, in my dreams, I see normal colors. But most of my
dreams are dark. Lately, I’ve been having black and white dreams.
Stella says maybe I could start doing black and white art. When I run,
the visions go away because it’s more bouncing around and the
colors disappear. When I paint, I’m doing a lot of movement, kind
of like my athletic days. Every once in awhile, when I’m doing a
painting, I’ll close my eyes and see it. One of those paintings I
call “Blind Spot.” I did that painting totally off my
eyesight. I’d close my eyes and paint it. Close my eyes and paint
it. Close my eyes and paint it.
What I’ve been doing lately is paintings based on my walks. Stella or my mom will drop me off at the edge of the desert and I’ll do about eight miles and come up with a string of paintings based on that walk. It has nothing to do with what I see—I can see the dirt road, the desert road, the dark creosote bushes against it. It’s not the physical landscape. It comes to me going up a hill and looking at a sky and there’s a shape, a curved view, so I’ll start with that shape. It’s not based on reality, on getting this yucca perfect, this mountainside perfect, not on the things I see in the physical world but things I see in my mind. Except I am seeing them.
I am the fruit of my mother and father. Cindi Huber was born in Manhattan but she grew up near Charon Massachusetts on a small farm with her parents and her brother Wallace. Cindi and Wallace used to fish in a small pond in their back yard. My mother was and still is a very pretty woman. She loved acting, and studied drama in high school. My mother is a butterfly. She loves the company of other people. Her laughter is welcome in any group. She loves people, and she is committed to improving the lives of people who cannot necessarily speak up for themselves. Cindi Huber has always lived like this.
There is another George Mendoza, living in New York. He is my Father. I am his first born son. I have only met him twice in my entire life, once when I was nine, and a second time when I was nineteen years old. I have talked with him a handful of times on the telephone. I can only remember receiving two letters from him. All of these communications were about me approaching him for some kind of relationship, and him warning me away.
I was born on April Fools Day in 1955, on Governor's island, New York. Cindi was twenty-six years old, and George was nineteen. My mother told me that one morning when I was two months old this man named George told her that he was going out to buy a newspaper. He never came back. Cindi was faced with being both mother and father to me. I am sure that this was a terrifying thing for her to face. But I sure didn't know it. My childhood was like a Disneyland fantasy. I grew up in Manhattan. Every weekend my mother and I would visit the Garden of Eden. She told me that Central Park was the Garden of Eden, and you could not have convinced me otherwise. The place was magical to me. I remember catching frogs and turtles, and feeding the squirrels out of my hand.
What I remember most about New York City were the tall buildings, the dinosaurs at the museums, and of course the Garden of Eden. Central Park divides the city right down the middle, the east side from the west side. My mother would always tell me, "Paradise is in our minds and hearts, Georgie! You have to make the most of what you have been given!" Everybody knows there are rats the size of cats in New York City. I was the child of a single parent in the city that people think of when they hear the word 'city'. I might have been sitting on the floor of a dark cold apartment, watching cold images on a black and white TV. This was not the life that my dearest friend and mother choose for me. My mother had the wisdom to show me the fruit of the Garden of Eden.
When I was six years old, my mother and I moved to a quaint town named Stony Brook on the northern shores of Long Island. Two hours by train from New York City, Stonybrook was another paradise. Living there meant that the woods, the beach, the cries of seagulls in the salty Atlantic air, were never more than a stone's throw away. I loved it there! As a boy, I walked through the swamps hunting for stingrays and sea turtles and horseshoe crabs and fish. I ran up and down the sandy bluffs and walked along the beaches all day long until I was sure I was lost. I remember that feeling of being lost. It was a fantasy, really, because I always knew where the shore was. The shore would lead me back home. But that feeling of being lost was special to me. That sense of adventure, that feeling of being on my own, is where I truly found myself!
I always came home to my mother, my Uncles Bob and Wallace, and my Grandparents, to a place where I was loved deeply and without question. School was fun. It was where I found good friends like Bobby Cook and Neal Hidalgo. They are still friends of mine today. My uncles Bob and Wallace would take me fishing for striped bass and bluefish. We always caught something. My uncles taught me how to find, catch, and clean a fish. We ate like kings.
Neal and Bobby and I went to summer camps, trekked through the woods, and swam all day in the ocean or in lake Ronkonkama. We played baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, and competed in track and field events in school. I was at home in school too. I was an honor-roll student and was surrounded by kids and teachers who appreciated me for who I was. I never felt alone.
When I was fifteen, everything went wrong. I lost my eyesight over the course of eight months. This would be hell for anyone, of course, but I was a star. That was all ripped out from under my feet before I even understood, or accepted, what had happened. Fundus Flavimaculatus, a rare hereditary eye disease, is what happened. My athletic life and school life simply fell apart. The school did not know what to do with me. They put me in a classroom with mentally retarded kids. My so-called friends shunned me. My cheerleader girlfriend made excuses that my blindness was contagious. A counselor at school actually took off his eyeglasses and told me that he understood what it means to be blind. At school I was actually alone.
I lost all of my central vision. What was left was peripheral vision out to about 4 feet. Even that was gray. But I also struggled constantly with blinding flashes of light and terrible headaches. I could only see well enough to get around when I was in direct sunlight.
My mother decided that we were going to move to New Mexico, where there is a highly rated school for the blind. My Aunt and grandparents lived there and they helped make the arrangements. At the New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped in Alamogordo I rediscovered my athletic ability in track and field. Running really helped me with relief from the headaches, maybe because of the oxygen in the blood flow. I never stopped running because of that. More important it helped me reestablish who I am. I was able to set real goals and I had the support of real friends. I ran with Winford Haynes who was already a world-class blind athlete. Winford is a great friend and a fantastic competitor. I graduated from the school in 1973 and set my sites on New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
I joined the Track Team at NMSU and trained daily. My Coach Art Morgan and I discovered that the secret to my performance was to compete against myself. I learned to run, with a companion (usually trailing far behind) through the deserts of Southern New Mexico. I ran against the stop-watch. This got great results for me. In 1979 I set the world record for the mile by a blind runner, at 4:31.7! This was at Western Illinois University in MaColm Illinois. Then came the Olympics for the Disabled, in Holland in 1980. There were 44 countries and over 1800 Athletes there. I placed fourth in the 1500 meter run. Then, in the 1984 Olympics for the disabled in Long Island, New York I ran the 1500 and 880 meter runs. This event featured 80 counties, and over 5000 athletes. I again took fourth place in the 1500 meter run.
After my Olympic experience I was working as Director for disabled student programs as New Mexico State University, from ’85 through ’93. I met a lot of very interesting people, and some of them loved my story so much that they wanted to do something with it. I met Robert Duval at a film festival in Santa Fe sometime around 1984. He told me that he wanted to make a film about my life’s story. About a year later we got funding from Peter Coors and the film became a reality. We shot The George Mendoza Story over the next four years, documenting my life story. Then in 1989 the film was released. It showed nationally on PBS six times over the next four years. The film was very well received, and suddenly I found myself being invited to appear as a motivational speaker all over the country.
I was on a roll. With the publicity generated by the film, best selling author William J. Buchanan approached me to write a book about my life. Bill was most impressed with the Mother/Son story, and with my determination to be someone. This book became Running Toward the Light. Actress Jane Seymour was kind enough to write the forward to the book. The people I greeted at book-signings and lectures told me that the book made them laugh, and cry. Bill had interview my Mother and many of the other people in my life. There are little pieces of all of them in the book. Bill later advised me that we had received several offers for the rights to make a film based on the story. I continued to speak all of the country.
In 1993 I left the university and started writing and painting full time. Years before I had talked to a Priest at the Holy Cross Retreat, here in Mesilla. I was complaining about my vision. I was plagued by flashes of light, pinwheels of green and yellow, blood red pools, and patterns of blue dots swimming in my eyes. It was driving me crazy. “Paint them,” he said. Make designs out of your vision.” But I was busy running then. His words, and his encouragement came back to me years later. I began to paint almost every day. I also began work on one of several books that I would write. The Spiritman Trilogy was published in 2000. I have several other books in progress. I just finished my one hundred and fifteenth painting, Sun King a few days ago. Sun king is a celebration of that birthday on April-Fools day in 1955. Most of my paintings have eyes and suns in them. Ironically I paint what I see in my visions and dreams.
-George Mendoza
Las Cruces, New Mexico.
June 6th, 2005.
You may call or e-mail George Mendoza concerning the show or speaking engagements.
call 505.522.1074
email gjmendoza@zianet.com
or visit his web site www.georgemendoza.com