Leslie Grimes painted three murals for the Farmer John Meats Company in the West, and although the one he did in Vernon, California, is probably the widest known- because it was featured in the background of a scene in Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970) – the one on Grant Street in Tucson is the one we like most.
It is a wraparound panorama of Western life that includes saguaro cacti, purple mountains, fleecy clouds overhead in an enormous sky, grazing cows, and angry bull- one charging and upending a cowhand. Leslie Grimes dies in 1968 when he fell off scaffold, but Tucsonian Maries Spark has assured us that the mural is regularly touched-up and repainted by Arno Johnson, who maintains its verisimilitude.
