It came as a surprise for eight-year-old Aljarno Patric Campbell and his family when his artwork Radiant Earth was selected to be used as the graphic for tickets to the second staging of Mount Plenty Organics’ Farm-to-Table charity event: A Fusion of Food Art and Goodwill.

The event is scheduled for today.

“I’m just so proud of him,” says his grandmother Pamela Brown. “It’s a shame his mother never got a chance to see how talented he is.”

Aljarno’s mother succumbed to her cancer diagnosis less than three years ago. He currently lives with his grandparents in Union — a short distance from Laura Facey-Cooper’s Mount Plenty Farm in Orange Hall in St Ann.

Facey-Cooper had hosted another of her annual Orange Hall summer schools in of 2016, which Aljarno attended for the first time. The third child of four to his mother, the bubbly young boy was excited to express his emotions on paper.

“Auntie Laura gave me crayons and paint… My favourite colour is green and I used green, red, blue, orange and purple to colour Radiant Earth,” he says.

The young boy used crayons as his medium to represent the Earth, with spheres of definitive colours framed in red.

“I feel glad,” is what he says when asked how he feels to have his work chosen to be on the tickets to the charity event.

Facey-Cooper explains that: “The summer programme is sponsored by the Cecil Boswell Facey Foundation. It’s about bringing the arts to children who don’t have it in their schools. We engage about 30 to 50 children from the surrounding environment and they do interesting things like tie-dying, drawing with crayons and pastels and paint, and making costumes for Junkanoo dancers. We dream up all sorts of exciting things.”

The boy’s aunt says she has every intention to send him to Facey-Cooper’s summer school in 2017 and beyond.

“I don’t even think his school [Exchange Primary] knows how talented he is. They do not have an art programme. Other people in the family are talented, but I will support him,” says Brown.

The charity event will give art enthusiasts the opportunity to acquire unique works from local artists, including Facey-Cooper, who is a renowned sculptor. The afternoon in Orange Hall, St Ann, forms part of the fundraising activities for Cecil Boswell Facey Foundation, the charitable arm of Pan-Jamaican Investment Trust Limited.

Last year’s staging raised $5.8 million. This year, the intention is to raise $10 million. Proceeds will be invested in art, the environment and educational programmes.