-Reuben Valdivia was born and raised in East Los Angeles.

-Motivated and encouraged from an early age to draw and paint.

-Attended East L.A. College for figure drawing, sculpture, and ceramics.

-Attended L.A. Trade Technical College for commercial art.

-In 1983, moved to northern California. Attended College of the Redwoods for oil painting.

-A few years later moved to his 40-acre mountain property, builds his home and studio.

-Reuben has traveled to Hawaii to surf, and to ancient Mayan sites all over Central America to seek inspiration.

-Reuben combines his zest for the outdoors, as an expert snowboarder, with his art.

-He responds to his heritage with the unique representations of Meso-American art.

-January 2000, New York City; Reuben holds his first one-man show. At the same time, he is included in the group show: Artists of the New Millenium, in NYC.

-Represented in Paris; Quebec; Montreal; New York City; Montreal; and Bend, OR.

Many of my paintings depict the relics of ancient civilizations. Usually of a Meso-American culture, sometimes Mayan, Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, as well as Hawaiian and Polynesian. I appropriate their old objects and enjoy exercising my creativity to give them a fresh, contemporary feel. I am looking backwards in time and techniques in order to stabilize the subject matter, to manifest its incarnation in its new, true form. By applying modern oil pigments and synthetic colors mixed with the finest hemp seed oil to a hemp canvas, I feel somewhat secure in hoping that these objects could survive the passage of a millennium or two, even if the society or civilization that made them has long ceased to exist.

For the last 25 years I have drawn and painted people and places of a forgotten paradise - lost in time past, present, and future.