At age fourteen after finishing six grades in school, Victor began earning money for himself and his family. With some of this money he bought art pencils, pens, and paper and began drawing. When he was seventeen his father died, and Victor went to work full time in the fields in order to take over support of his family. He had to give up any notion of painting but continued to draw upon occasion.

In 1992 an accomplished woodcarver from San Pedro, Vicente Cumes, and I visited Victor to see his drawings. The pencil sketches, although somewhat rough, were brimming with action. Victor filled the compositions with people; they occupied the entire space. Impressed by Victor's raw talent, we supplied him with some new brushes and scrounged oil paints, and showed him how to fix the canvas on a stretcher. Victor said he was not ready to paint and wanted to find a teacher, but he was persuaded to try. In a week he produced a very pleasing small painting, remarking that the most difficult part of the work was staying seated for long hours, something a field worker was not used to.

Even in his early pencil drawings, it's clear that Victor draws from his own observation of the way things appear. This sets him apart from the rest of the painters of San Pedro and San Juan. The younger artists have all learned from artists who are already painting. They tend to paint things the way they have seen them rendered by other artists.

Victor's people may appear to be casually drawn, but when combined with the dynamic angles of their limbs and their acrobatic positions, this looseness of painting makes the figures seem ready to spring into action.

A keen observer of people, Victor lets a natural pattern emerge from the chaos of the various angles of head, arms, legs, hands, and feet in a scene rather than an artificial order. Individually and collectively, every figure is intrinsically involved in whatever activity is taking place, whether it is picking cotton or pulling a bus out of the mud. The children in his paintings, like real children, often focus their interest on things unimportant to their parents.

The incredible exuberance of Victor's art captures the essence of the Guatemalan people and their natural environment. Victor is only one of two Tz'utuhil Maya painters who allow the modern world to intrude upon the traditional—trucks and buses appear naturally in his work. His paintings manifests the strength of spirit that has carried the rich culture of the Mayan people through hundreds of years of outside influence until the present day.

To contact us write: Arte Maya Tz'utuhil, P.O. Box 40391, San Francisco, CA 94140.  Telephone: (415) 282-7654. Email me at