Samuel Andrés Mendoza carefully chooses the colors of dozens of pencils scattered on the crowded kitchen table in his humble home in Venezuela as he sits down to draw. The teenager makes long and short movements to get different effects in his drawing. He hums reggaeton while holding colored pencils of different lengths and changes the pressure to add contrast to the anime character that takes shape on his block of sketches.
Samuel sold the drawing online for a dollar. It is an effort that began in January with a tweet – to an account created behind his mother – in the hope of earning some money and giving his family a respite from the financial challenges facing most people in this southern country. Americans with problems.
Hi, this is Samuel. I sell my drawings for a dollar to help my mother with my diet, I buy her a house and a warehouse so that she doesn’t work on the street and get COVID and buy peanut butter for me, thank you sir and madam “, he wrote on Twitter together with the photos of four drawings. His tweet went viral, and from this table with a woven tablecloth, placed between a used sofa and a rusty refrigerator, he drew and sold dozens of illustrations.
“Honestly, I didn’t know I was going to draw like that, but time passed and I managed to paint for real,” said 14-year-old Samuel in early March, proudly pointing to Goku’s finished drawing, a character from the Japanese animated series Dragon Ball. – And here it is.
Samuel, his mother and two brothers live in Barquisimeto, once a thriving agro-industrial city about five hours west of the Venezuelan capital. In a country where workers earn an average salary of two dollars a month, their designs can make a big difference in the family budget.
Venezuela is plunged into a deep political, social and economic crisis, which many critics attribute to the two decades of socialist governments that bankrupted the once rich oil country. The country is also in its sixth year of recession, and its people are facing high dollar prices for food, low wages and four-digit inflation, condemning millions to live in poverty.
The crisis has forced nearly five million people to leave Venezuela in recent years in search of better living conditions.
Samuel and his mother, Magdalena Rodríguez, emigrated to Colombia in 2019, when the outages in Venezuela coincided with the diagnosis of adolescent malnutrition. But, Rodriguez said, the duo returned to their home country in December after losing their jobs and Venezuelans in the Colombian community where they lived were discriminated against after a group of immigrants robbed a grocery store.
Since returning to Venezuela, she has struggled to make money and buy food, which is especially important for the budding artist. The malnutrition, which Rodríguez says caused him to lose muscle mass, requires him to follow a strict, high-protein diet of six meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner and a snack between them.
“If you do it right, it would be like $ 100 a week,” Magdalena said, referring to Samuel’s diet. “It’s not easy, I didn’t get there” due to the high cost of food.
Rodriguez can occasionally afford to buy fish, which is high in protein, but enough for Samuel to eat, not for the whole family. Samuel also has Asperger’s syndrome, which, according to Rodríguez, causes him anxiety, which causes him to seek refuge in food.
Samuel said he started drawing at the age of five. These days, the young man has to listen to music while drawing. She wants to buy her mother a house so she can have a more spacious room.
Some who discovered Samuel’s Twitter account requested 10 drawings at a time. He has a penchant for anime characters, but he also drew football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and the animated character SpongeBob.
Venezuelan artist and muralist Oscar Olivares, who runs an art academy, saw Samuel’s tweets and awarded him a scholarship to study drawing. Her followers on social media also offered her a laptop, an expensive set of pencils and peanut butter, a good source of protein.
Samuel said he could increase the prices of his drawings now that he has advanced to his academy classes. He would like to make video-style videos on YouTube when he grows up.
Before Samuel’s tweet went viral, his mother used her own Twitter account to apply for a job. That gave him a cleaning job and someone set up an online fundraising account.
Rodriguez, 38, discovered Samuel’s effort when he asked for information about his bank account so that people could pay for his artwork. The money also allowed them to buy products that she can sell at a small sandwich stand in downtown Barquisimeto.
On a recent trip to a nearby cooperative, Rodríguez bought family food, including a few jars of baby compote, a box of cereal and beans. He paid about eight dollars in cash. The mother buys dollars to protect herself from the continuous devaluation of the bolivar, the local currency.
“Proud of him, I really have no words,” Rodriguez said. “But, sometimes I feel angry, I feel helpless, because I think that at his age he has to learn, study and not want to work for him wanting to help me when I am the one who has to do everything possible to give us comfort and food ”.