To draw the possible dream: while well known for his satirical cartoons of Mexican society, Abel Quezada painted private works of joy and optimism.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

For nearly half a century most Mexicans have known cartoonist Abel Quezada as the inventor of Don Gaston Billetes, El Charro Matias, El Campesino Flaco, and a host of other memorable characters who appeared in major newspapers throughout the country. Through these creations and countless other illustrated, episodic microcuentos he delighted his readers by poking fun at intellectuals, the military, politicians, bureaucrats, the police, and almost every other sector of Mexican society. But, despite his fame as his country's premier satirical cartoonist, there was a far less visible side to Quezada: that of a serious artist who excelled as both watercolorist and painter in oils. During the last two decades of his life he produced snore than two hundred paintings, some of which appeared on covers of the New Yorker and the New Fork Times Magazine as well as Artes de Mexico, which devoted an entire issue to his career. His painterly exploits gained further attention when the Museo Rufino Tamayo and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City both held solo exhibitions of his work during the early eighties. Several hooks also enhanced his reputation, including a full-color monograph called El cazador de musas, published in 1989, just two years before he succumbed to leukemia at age seventy.

"He always liked to call himself a Sunday painter," says his widow, Yolanda Rueda de Quezada, at her home in Cuernavaca, "which strictly speaking was true because he did most of his work here on weekends. Actually, it was my father, a newspaperman with Excelsior and Novedades, who got him started. My father liked to paint and once, in the early seventies, when he noticed his son-in-law was under a great deal of stress due to journalistic commitments, he suggested oil painting as a form of relaxation, so Abel took his advice. My husband worked quickly, often completing an entire painting its a clay or a weekend. If he didn't finish he could barely wait to return the following weekend to complete it. He liked to be surrounded by family and friends. Everyone would come to his studio there across the garden. He could concentrate even with people around; he wrote articles that way, too."

Quezada's studio, with an adjoining bar, seating for guests, and even a couch for naps (on a little balcony at one end of the room), remains much as it was when he was alive. A large potted palm occupies one corner, large windows overlooking the garden provide plenty of light, and favorite paintings adorn the walls. An oak file card cabinet still stores his oils and brushes. "He loved to have the kids around him," says Yolanda. "To his grandson, Emilio, he would assign the job of squeezing out the colors: 'Blue here, yellow there.' When they wanted to paint like him, he let them and then they would sign their names."

In front of a small worktable where he drew and did watercolors resides his favorite wooden armchair, its surface painted in a leopard skin pattern of yellow with brown spots and each arm carved into an incongruous dog's head. The chair figures prominently in a portrait of the friend who gave it to him, also in a painting called Retrato de dos Juanes, a self-portrait in the guise of a gentleman the artist claimed resembled both Pope John XXIII and painter Juan Soriano. (Quezada enjoyed making this sort of tongue-in-cheek comment regarding his work.) The room also contains two biombos, or painted screens, one depicting military figures, the other on the balcony ruth a Rousseau-esque scene inspired by a trip the artist, his wife, and a lady friend made to India. Quezada shows the trio with two local guides riding aloft a massive elephant undaunted by the presence of two tigers frozen in mid-leap (the back one lacks hind feet). He appears as a British colonial in khaki uniform with pit helmet while Yolanda and her friend lounge in traditional Indian garb and lots of jewelry. "You will notice that he's pointing assertively where we should go when in fact we had had a little disagreement because I favored a different course of action," Yolanda chuckles. "Sometime after he completed the screen, he changed it to reflect this difference of opinion by painting in my arm pointing in the opposite direction! Often he would add little personal touches like that."

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