José Antonio Velasquez (1906-1982) is one of the best known artists in Honduras. He proudly carried the label “primitive artist” from his home village in Caridad, Valle to San Antonio de Oriente, El Paraiso where he was the town’s telegraph operator, to Zamorano where he was the barber and eventually to La Manchen in Tegucigalpa.

Ironically, one North American helped make Velasquez famous on a global level and another is the author of his only biography. William Lewis, who has written about a dozen books in Honduras under the pen name “Guillermo Yuscaran” is the author of this 1994 biography. Wilson Poponoe, founder of Lancetilla botanical gardens in Tela and also of the Escuela Agricola Pan Americana in Zamorano, gave Velasquez a job as barber at the school and promoted his paintings. Eventually Poponoe persuaded an art expert from the Organization of American States (OAS) to sponsor a show of Velasquez in Washington D.C.

Velasquez is best known for his wonderful village scenes, most of which are of the quaint village of San Antonio de Oriente, just six kilometers off the road at Zamorano and 40 kilometers from Tegucigalpa. As a young telegraph operator assigned to the village he fell in love with and married Raquel Maradiaga, the daughter of a local shop keeper. Only four feet eight inches tall, Velasquez was an artistic giant who put Honduras on the map of the art world.
The author, Guillermo Yuscaran, is an accomplished painter himself and spent time with Velasquez and his family from 1978 until the artist’s death in 1982. The book is the result of numerous interviews with the artist, his wife, a half dozen of his children and even his grandchildren, one of whom still paints in his grandfather’s style. Yuscaran quotes generously from the interviews and goes into great detail about Velasquez’s youth and his everyday life in rural Honduras. Velasquez only received a primary school education, but back in the days when it actually meant something.

He was encouraged to draw and paint by the sole school teacher in the village of Caridad and further inspired by a retired teacher in the village who had been the regional superintendent of schools.

Yuscaran also places the various stages of the artist’s life into the political and economic events of the times, including the long dictatorship of Carias. Having visited San Antonio and similar villages, I enjoyed the descriptions of rural village life. It’s amazing to read how in 1924, the young Velazquez and his brother had to walk with mules for days due to the lack of roads to go from Caridad, Valle near the Pacific Ocean to Tela, Atlantida on the Atlantic. The painter tells the author about walking down towards the Sula Valley from Lago Yojoa: “It was the first time I had seen such wide expanses of flatland with miles and miles of sugarcane and bananas growing like a green blanket beneath the sun. It was hot and humid and the roads had suddenly become more crowded. We weren’t the only young men on our way to work for the fruit companies.”

Into the late 1930s Velasquez still walked with a mule the forty kilometers to Tegucigalpa to sell his paintings. Those readers newer to Honduras hopefully will be interested in the history and folksy background as well.

Velasquez did have a drinking problem which his wife worried about more than he did, but he was a prolific painter. Eventually the family moved into Barrio La Manchen in Tegucigalpa so that the children could attend better schools. Velasquez’s art became famous and he was invited to exhibit his work in such places as the United States, Panama, Spain and France. In 1972 the Organization of American States made a documentary movie about the artist called “The Life of the Primitive Painter.”

The picturesque village of San Antonio de Oriente celebrates its feast day on June 13 (St. Anthony of Padua). This village, the scene of the vast majority of the artist’s paintings, was declared part of the “Patrimonio Nacional” in 1995. However San Antonio is suffering the fate of many villages near the capital and has shrunken to only 186 people, but a visit is recommended.

The book, in Spanish and English, is available in many bookstores and is well worth reading, both to learn about the painter and to catch a glimpse of a humble, self-taught, rural Honduran whose art is admired throughout the art world.

(I suggest a color picture of the cover of the book (the artist’s self portrait) or a color picture of one or two of his paintings. If not available elsewhere, they are in the back of the book.)