Artist Keith Keller, traveling in Mexico. stopped in SMA for a day. He had $200 in his pocket. He was on his way home. It was 1985.

After settling into his $5 a night room, like most tourists, he found his way to the Jardin. He sat on a bench in the late afternoon sun, looked around, and thought, “this would be a nice place to live.”

He noticed a little gaggle of girls sitting on the Jardin wall. He pulled out his small sketchpad and started to draw. When he was finished, a man asked him how much he wanted for the drawing. $20 the artist told him, and the man fished out a twenty-dollar bill.

Keller's paintings fit no particular genre although he is occasionally compared to the ash can school and social realism schools of the mid-twentieth century in America.

Although his subjects vary from bars to wars. He mostly paints women.