Gallery

I'm Always Hungry: A Memorial Exhibition

18 March - 14 April 2023

Jazmin was born in 1971 in Guadalajara, Mexico, daughter of the famous political cartoonist Joaquín Velasco and niece of  two distinguished masked wrestlers, El Apolo and El Diablo Velasco, thus establishing from the beginning her dual approach to life, the artist and the warrior. She became an accomplished martial artist, a black belt practitioner and teacher who saw art and martial art as two aspects of the same thing, the improvement of oneself and of the world around us.

By the age of 18 she was working as a cartoonist in a national newspaper, studied graphic art and illustration and moved to Mexico City where she soon established herself as one of the best-known book illustrators in the country. She moved to London in the year 2000.

Jazmin possessed a formidable talent for drawing, no doubt inheriting the expressive line from her father. She worked fast and never seemed to make a mistake, filling a sketchbook in no time with characters, ideas and stories which would surface later in other media. She had clever hands too, a born crafts-person, picking up challenging techniques with no apparent difficulty, moving from one to another with humour and quiet intelligence.

And then there was that virtue so valuable to the artist. She was fearless. She would relish as much the opportunity to batter men twice her size in the boxing ring as to take on yet another artistic medium. Stone carving for example. She once invited a stone mason to spend a day with her in the studio, bought the tools and spent the next week bashing bits of Portland stone into Mexican gods. Typical Jazmin.

This was all cut short by her tragic and untimely death in 2021. But those of us who were fortunate enough to know her will cherish her memory as a true example of how an artist should live.

Colin Moore