Lee Cataluna
Makakilo artist fills home with portraits

Marcelo Vendiola is surrounded by some of the thousands of paintings that fill his Makakilo home. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Mona Lisa hangs next to a portrait of Ben Cayetano. Monet, Jeremy Harris and Gen. MacArthur share a wall with a scene from a chicken fight. Pope John Paul I is in the corner with Michael Jordan and Dave Shoji.

It's a stunning gallery of 40 years of work, and no one has ever seen it. No one but family and close friends.

Marcelo Vendiola loves to paint. And paint. And paint. His Makakilo home is filled with literally thousands of his pieces, hung from wall to ceiling, stacked in rooms and stairwells, all carefully organized and catalogued.

He's painted portraits of politicians from Cal Kawamoto to Richard Nixon, local celebrities from Joe Moore to Aku, and all his buddies from the 5th Regimental Combat Team and the 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment. He's done landscapes and seascapes, soft still-lifes and some wild abstract stuff. He has also done reproductions of the masters, particularly Monet and Van Gogh, as a way to study their technique.

And he's never sold a single painting. Not one.

"What I like is somebody buy the whole thing one time," he says, then he laughs to let you know that he's not serious.

"Sometimes, I think, why I paint this kind? I can paint whales. Whales more easy. Those guys, they make big money with whales. But I like paint this kind."

Vendiola turns 78 this week. He has had a string of health problems, including diabetes, heart bypass surgery, cataracts and bladder cancer. He's starting to think about what to do with his huge collection when he's gone.

"I born in Waipahu. And I think if I going die, I going die in Waipahu, over there in St. Francis Hospital."

His wife of 60 years hears this and gives him a swat with her hand. She swats him again just to make sure he gets the message. There will be no such talk as far as Bea Vendiola is concerned. The couple met when he was a young GI stationed in the Philippines and she was making extra money doing laundry for the soldiers. Bea was 14 years old when they got married. Some of Vendiola's most beautiful pieces are portraits of her.

"She part of me, and I'm part of her already," Vendiola says.

When he paints the men he served with in combat in both World War II and Korea, he always makes several of the same portraits. Many of the men he calls "the boys" are gone now, and Vendiola likes to both keep their pictures near him and also give them as remembrances to their families.

Vendiola is also a shutter bug. He served as official photographer for VFW Post 1572 and the Fort Shafter post and for the 5th Regimental Combat Team. His collection of 40,000 photos and slides are all labeled and catalogued and fill up the one wall of his home studio that isn't covered with paintings. One of his most recent projects was photographing the closing of the Waipahu sugar mill.

"The last day, I was at Arakawa's and I took a picture of the smoke coming out. The next day, I went back, no more smoke. That's history."

It all started when he was stationed at Fort Knox, Ky. Vendiola used his GI bill to take art classes at night. He loved the impressionist style best, but through the years, has tried just about everything. He even has a piece he describes, with a twinkle in his eye, as "abstract art." It's lumps of extra paint from his pallet combined with hair that he saves from his hair cuts and clippings of his fingernails.

"I'm just like Van Gogh. He was little bit lolo like that," he jokes.

As to what will become of the approximately 2,000 paintings, Vendiola will leave that decision to his children and grandchildren. He surveys his art, the work that never made him rich, never made him famous, all stacked together in his humble Makakilo home, and he smiles.

"I'm happy. I'm happy what I did. That's all."