Lewis William Rubenstein (1908-2003) first made sketches of women working in the countryside surrounding Oaxaca while travelling through Mexico in 1952 with his family. This was the first of many painting trips where Lewis took his camera, his sketch books and lived in the local society, always on the alert for visually stunning images. Driving the dirt roads of Mexico in his 1948 Plymouth and living in a rooming house in Mexico City, Lewis found many such images in the vibrant religious and cultural life of the country. The original sketches were transformed into a lithograph at the Taller Grafica in Mexico City, where Lewis worked with other Mexican artists. Thirty years later in 1983 Lewis painted the oil version of the Gleaners. In the Gleaners the land is nurturing the mother, who nurtures the child on her back who in time will tend the fields.

For Lewis, the scene of the women and child in the field was a powerful metaphor of human beings in nature, the cyclical nature of life and “the dance of interacting parts of life.” The central theme of gleaners appeared in many of Rubenstein’s later work such as the 104 Psalm and the Sea Gleaners depicting a mother child on the beach in Kamakura, Japan All these works illustrated the need for human sustenance, human work and an almost biblical sense of the portion and lot of human beings in the universe. In a sense Rubenstein was fifty years ahead of his time in painting a picture of development that is based on a respect for nature, equality between the genders and the central importance of the bond between a mother and a child. Today, modern viewers would use terms such as sustainable development, land reform earth justice to describe a concept that Rubenstein intuitively grasped and captured in the moment, sitting in a field at dusk in the fields near Oaxaca. As a child of six, I vividly remember playing with other Mexican children in that field. More information on the varied and rich artistic life of Lewis Rubenstein can be found in Lewis Rubenstein, A Hudson Valley Painter (The Overlook Press, 1998, Woodstock, New York).

Daniel Blake Rubenstein, 15 October 2007, Ottawa, Canada