The Yuma Farm Workers Art Book
Little did I know that my prior painting series would prepare me for my most recognized series of paintings, “The Yuma Farm Worker Art Series”, which focused on real people, right here in Yuma County. My paintings are a tribute to the people who worked the earth so that we can have herbs, fruits, and vegetables at our tables year round throughout our Nation.
Excerpt from book . . .
When I first started driving to work in the Yuma Valley eighteen years ago, approximately a 30-minute commute, I barely noticed what was happening around me. After our two daughters left home to attend Northern Arizona University, it was as though a filter was removed from my eyes. I began to see the entire splendor that surrounded me as I drove through the Yuma Valley. The contrast of the patchwork fields against the indigo sky was wonderment to my eyes. Often, I’d see the valley change its colors as a thick cloud formation slowly shadowed the multitude of different farm crops.
During the late spring, I saw a sea of greens, sunflower yellows, crimsons and creams, and sometimes-luscious plum colors in a few of the valley crops. A field that had been flood irrigated; it seemed as though it was a lake. Birds such as cow egrets, and occasionally a gray pelican, often hovered overhead and drank from the refreshing waters.
Long before my daily work began in the morning, many farm workers were already laboring in the fields. Surprisingly, I would also see the farm workers at the end of their day after I returned home from a night class at the local college/university.
In the past when we shopped for groceries at the local store, my children and I never asked, “How do the fruits and vegetables get here?” “How many processes do they go through before they end up on my family’s dining room table? “ I started to take more of an interest in the valley, the people, crops, landscape, birds, and animals, by first observing them closely and then reading about them. I soon learned that lettuce, citrus, watermelons, cauliflower, tomatoes, potatoes, artichokes, cotton, cabbages, dates, peaches, pecans, Sudan grass, and others grow right here in our Yuma Valley.
More and more people are finding that Yuma is a real paradise. The Yuma Valley was once a vast land that seemed to go on forever in the 1950s when I was a child, but now I see the valley getting much smaller. Yuma is a growing community of many people with different backgrounds. It is not unusual to see U. S. Marines doing their morning runs, children boarding yellow school buses, and farm workers traveling in a white produce bus all at the same time.
I’ve documented part of Yuma’s majesty by taking photographs and painting all the beauty that I saw.
