Samuel Andrés Mendoza carefully chooses the colors from dozens of pencils scattered around the packed kitchen table of his modest home in Venezuela as he sits down to draw. The adolescent uses long and short strokes to achieve different effects in his drawing. He hums reggaeton while holding crayons of different lengths and changes the pressure to add contrast to the anime character taking shape on his sketch pad.
Samuel sold the drawing online for a dollar. It’s an effort that started in January with a tweet – to an account created behind his mother’s back – hoping to make a little money and give his family a break from the financial challenges they face, such as most of the inhabitants of this troubled South American country.
Hi, I am Samuel. I sell my drawings for a dollar to help my mom with my diet, buy her a house and a warehouse so she doesn’t work on the street and get sick from COVID and buy me a peanut butter thank you sir and madam ”, tweeted he along with the photos of four drawings His tweet went viral and from this table with a woven tablecloth, placed between a worn sofa and a rusty refrigerator, he has drawn and sold dozens of illustrations.
“To be honest, I didn’t know I was going to draw like this, but the time has passed and I managed to actually paint,” said 14-year-old Samuel in early March, proudly showing his finished drawing of Goku, a character from the Japanese animated series Dragon Ball. “And here it is.”
Samuel, his mother and two brothers live in Barquisimeto, once a prosperous agro-industrial city about five hours west of the Venezuelan capital. In a country where workers earn an average of two dollars a month, their drawings can make a big difference to the family budget.
Venezuela is embroiled in a deep political, social and economic crisis, which many critics attribute to two decades of socialist governments that bankrupted the once rich oil country. The country is also in the sixth year of a recession, and residents are struggling with high dollar-denominated food prices, low wages and four-digit inflation, condemning millions to live in poverty.
In recent years, the crisis has forced nearly five million people to leave Venezuela in search of better living conditions.
Samuel and his mother, Magdalena Rodríguez, emigrated to Colombia in 2019 when widespread blackouts in Venezuela coincided with a diagnosis of adolescent malnutrition. But, said Rodríguez, the duo returned to their homeland in December after losing their job and discriminating against Venezuelans in the Colombian community they lived in after a group of immigrants robbed a supermarket.
Since returning to Venezuela, she has struggled to earn money and buy food, which is especially crucial for the budding artist. Malnutrition, which Rodríguez says has lost muscle mass, requires him to follow a strict, high-protein diet of six meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner, and a snack.
“If you do it right, it would be about $ 100 a week,” Magdalena said, referring to Samuel’s diet. “It’s not easy, we didn’t get there” because of the high food costs.
Rodriguez can afford to buy fish from time to time, which is rich in protein, but only enough for Samuel to eat, not for the whole family. Samuel also has Asperger’s syndrome, which, according to Rodríguez, causes him fear, which leads him to take refuge in food.
Samuel said he started drawing at the age of five. Today, the young person has to listen to music while drawing. She wants to buy a house for her mother so that she can get a more spacious room.
Some who discovered Samuel’s Twitter account requested 10 drawings at a time. He has a fondness for anime characters, but has also drawn football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and the animated character SpongeBob.
Venezuelan artist and muralist Oscar Olivares, who runs an art school, saw Samuel’s tweets and awarded him a scholarship to study drawing. Her social media followers also gifted her a laptop, an expensive set of crayons, and peanut butter, a good source of protein.
Samuel said he could raise the prices of his drawings now that he has progressed to the level of his academy classes. When he grows up, he would love to make YouTube style video game videos.
Before Samuel’s tweet went viral, his mother used her own Twitter account to apply. That got her a cleaning job and someone set up an online fundraising account for her.
Rodríguez, 38, discovered Samuel’s effort when he asked for his bank account information so people could pay for his artwork. The money also allowed them to buy products that they can sell at a small sandwich stand in the center of Barquisimeto.
On a recent trip to a nearby cooperative, Rodríguez bought some food for the family, including several 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 continued devaluation of the bolivar, the local currency.
“I am really proud of him, I have no words,” said Rodriguez. “ But yeah sometimes I feel anger, I feel helpless because I think at his age he needs to learn, study and not work for him and help me when I’m the one who has to do everything possible to give us comfort and food ”.