Francisco Javier Estrada

Francisco J. Estrada was born on 20 March 1981 in East Los Angeles, California. He was still a teenager when he suffered a spinal cord injury in a drive-by shooting. At the hospital, he learned that he would be paralysed at the C4 level. The time at the Rehabilitation Centre (Rancho) was difficult for him. He always had a talent for painting, but when a therapist told him about painting and drawing with his mouth, he thought she was just “delusional”!
Mr Estrada has learned to type and turn pages with a mouth stick. A few years later, he was back in Rancho with a pressure ulcer when one of the social workers started telling him the stories of other patients with similar injuries. He also brought a paint-by-numbers set. This picture lay on the table for a few days until it was finished.
After that he was hooked, he started to focus on what he could do, not on what he couldn’t do. He began exhibiting his work at the “Art of Rancho”, where he met Esvin Rodriguez, Ann Ruth, both Scholarship Holders of the VDMFK, and Robert Thome, late member of the VDMFK. It was these great artists who told him about the VDMFK.