Ana Maria de Martinez

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Ana María de Martínez (May 28, 1937 - December 16, 2012)^[1] was a Salvadoran artist. She was unable to attend an art academy, leading her to later develop her art skills in a self-taught way. After raising her three boys alongside her husband, she found herself artistically in her 30s where she rediscovered her love of art, developing into an renowned artist and dedicated herself to creating acrylic paintings on canvas for almost four decades.^[2]

Biography[]

On May 28, 1937, Ana María Avilés was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador. She was the fourth child of Maruca de Avilés and Narciso Avilés and the younger sister of Salvadoran painter San Aviles (1932–1991). In 1943, the Avilés family moved to the capital, San Salvador. Ana María took basic and higher studies and at the age of twenty-two, in 1959, she married Oswaldo Martínez, an architect and begin to be called Ana María Martínez.

A deep religious feeling and a vocation to art led her to the workshop of a French sculptor who visited San Salvador and who invited her to modeling classes. The use of clay, the traditional material of the Central American ancestral cultures, arouse in her a interest in pre-Columbian art that led her to visit archaeological sites in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Belize.

Moved by Mayan art and culture, Martínez establishes a dialogue with her ancestors, thus discovering her own means of expression and painting as a vehicle for her plastic language. A pictorial work anchored in these links with the past and translated into forty-four works with Mayan themes, in 1976 at the age of thirty-nine, she carried out her first exhibition with great success. Ana María Martínez the painter was born.

From the period of the paintings of Mayan and colonial themes, she moves towards forkloric themes, fields full of flowers, the regional scenes, in a style of marked naif accent. She already shows a solid balance between shapes and colors. The richness and exuberance of both, translated into the hundreds of multicolored flowers, make her surfaces poetic songs to nature. Ana María expressed her emotional states through those visual poems. Six of these paintings were auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. In 1983-1984, with symbolic character, she introduces walls into the landscapes, sometimes insects appeared that, like the bee, called her attention for their industriousness and order. For her, the wall was “like the hard things in life that are part of it. Here I felt that I was beginning to undergo a change .” Seeking to perfect her pictorial technique, she gradually moves away from this primitive style, "I began to paint not only out of necessity, but a search was imposed on me." She delves into the imaginary and into her fantasy to create new themes resulting in still lifes.

From 1985 to 1989 she moves within a thematic romanticism of a strange nature. She mixes elements of great realism, with dreamlike elements, taken from the universe of the fantastic. Baskets with flowers of rare splendor of unknown origin within, imaginary volcanoes erupting with flowers, fruits that became so real they became impossible, but "I was so concentrated painting them that I could perceive their smell and taste".

She receives an invitation from the Italian government to participate in the Spoletto Art Festival "Dei Due Mondi" in 1986. The success was immediate, "after that experience I was never the same again, it influenced me so much that I traveled again to study, I returned to museums, to galleries, which I had already visited.” An intense year, personal exhibitions and participation in important collectives follow one another. Another beautiful event is added, the publication of the book entitled “Tierra de Infancia”, with narrations by the illustrious Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars and illustrations by Ana María.

After 1989 she enters another stage, which she herself will call Theaters. Here she combines the theme, definitely in the line of the still life, with the refined technique that she had masterfully developed by force of study and hard work. In relation to this, she sensed what she wanted, she knew that her brother, Ernesto, had managed to create an impeccable painting, but ... "I cried because I did not know how to do it, I knew what I wanted, but not how to do it. I prepared my fabrics and then I was painting with waxes, with means that emerged from my investigations, and then I gave it what I call the finish, the last thing I do is a wax mixed with acrylic and other chemical materials, it is a big little secret that I keep .” She concentrates the theme in a kind of increased vision of the forms in the foreground. The painting will become a surface by eliminating any accessory perspective. Now she focuses on a composition that eliminates conventional codes. It may be directed in different axes of composition, but ... "at the same time I want to offer a mystery, that when people see it they are ready to dream, many times I have not wanted to find the traditional still life, sometimes it comes out, sometimes it doesn't, I wanted something that seemed to fall from the sky, in accordance with a huge mutation that we are experiencing .”

Artistic periods[]

Her work is often compared to the Dutch Masters of the 17th century for her mastery of light and the art of chiaroscuro, the technique of contrasting light and shade in order to enhance shape, form, texture, and transparency.^[3]

Oranges—her indisputable object of artistic focus—center in most of her current paintings due to their unmistakable multicolored tones that Ana Maria plays with, giving away her sentiment of sensuality in exploring the infinite possibilities of texture and color in her delicate traces on canvas. Ana Maria does not pretend to make a photographic copy of the natural fruit in her current paintings, rather she intends to capture their surrealistic essence through a rational composition of dots, blurs, spots, lights, and shadows—entering the world of magical hyperrealism of Ana Maria, a reality only existing in her imagination, which is given to her audience, elegantly showing also her profound knowledge and use of chiaroscuro. A similar thing happens when gazing upon her "grapes", featured three dimensionally with all their splendor..."and, likewise, every painting holds its secrets...".

Primitive Period

Martínez began her career in the late 1960s in what is known in Spanish as her "Epoca Primitiva", which roughly translates to "Primitive Period" which began after she participated in a clay modeling course sponsored by the French embassy in San Salvador (1967–1968), where she made casts and polychrome pourings using many techniques including encaustics, which she would later use in paintings, combined with other contemporary techniques and materials. It was during this time that Ana Maria, inspired by Mayan and Colonial art, began the search for a style of her own where she could begin to express her message of "Spiritual peace and the joy of living". She focuses on regional landscapes and the traditions of Salvadoran folklore and its surroundings—fields of flowers and scenes with great architectonic ideas—all executed with great precision. In this period, carrying on until around 1982, she evolves very quickly, blending colors with the magic of the artist.^[2]

Period of Walls

In the next, albeit brief, period (1983–1984), known in Spanish as the "Epoca de Muros" (Roughly translating into "Period of Walls") Martínez seeks to evolve with other concepts and paints works which always contain walls—with which she expresses the technical difficulties that she needed to overcome. Her brush lands on a stage where the focus is this architectonic element of a wall that needs to be surpassed—becoming like a quintessential window that needs to be opened to let in the floral nature of its surroundings. She uses many animals during this time, mainly bees, which in an ironic play of events in life foreshadows a tragic event she would endure next to her husband.

Romantic Period

The "Romantic Period" (1986–1989), known as the "Epoca Romantica" in Spanish follows, where Martínez lets go of her casual primitivism and ventures inside the creation of harmonious and sophisticated shapes and forms. Her compositions are a blend of high reality elements with flowers, fruits and volcanoes. Her artwork is published to reflect the poetry of Salvadorean poet, Claudia Lars (actual name Carmen Brannon) in Tierra de Infancia.^[4] It is through this newfound technique that she creates a unique style of transparency and texture achieving the acrylic perfection she is known for today. The imaginative blend of colors and textures allows her to paint her iconic oranges, in all their brilliance, blended with the transparency of her grapes as a symbol of the artistic abundance of the great Salvadoran painter.

Final Period, the Current Period

This leads to her "Current Period", beginning in the early 1990s, where Martínez has been developing a novel technique using acrylic colors and wax, enabling her to paint images of great transparency and accomplish that unique finishing. In her paintings of modern "still life" and other compositions, Martínez wishes to express the abundance of this world in this point in time: the growth of people, traffic, the high production, lights, sounds and everything that affect people in their ordinary lives. By this principle, sometimes, some of her compositions almost touch the borders of opulence, although always keeping their elegance and harmony, where she wishes to expose the sense of belonging to an age of metaphysical ideas through a heavy dose of symbolism.

Recognition[]

Martínez's artwork has not only transcended geographical barriers, but her artwork has been considered within that of great Latin American Masters, most recently forming part of the permanent collection of the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York in January 2010.^[5] "Teatro de Naranjas (Theater of Oranges) (1991) by Salvadoran Ana Maria de Martinez lives up to its title by presenting the subject matter of still life in a highly theatrical way"^[6]

Along her artistic career Martínez has received important acknowledgments of her work, such as "Distinguished Visitor" by the mayor of Miami, Florida, USA; "Certificate of Appreciation" by the city of Coral Gables, Florida, USA for her participation in the development of art and culture.^[7] Moreover, her work has been successfully auctioned at prestigious galleries worldwide, such as Sotheby's and Christie's New York, among others.^[7]

• Sale of "Theater of Oranges" at Christie's New York: Thursday, May 19, 1994 [Lot 250] in LATIN AMERICAN PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, SCULPTURE AND PRINTS^[8]
• Sale of "Mandarines" at Christie's New York: Wednesday, May 17, 1995 [Lot 249] in Important Latin American Pntgs, Draws & Sculpture^[9]
• Sale of "Dead Nature with Oranges and Grapes" at Christie's New York: Tuesday, November 21, 1995 [Lot 257] in Important Latin American Pntgs, Draws & Sculpture^[10]

Her works reside in highly prestigious museums and collections, such as the Duchess of Alba collection in Spain, the private collection of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the permanent collection of contemporary painters of El Salvador in "Museo Marte" (the National Gallery of El Salvador) where she was featured as the "Artist of the Month" in February 2010,^[11] the exhibit "Latinas!" in Jan 2010 to Feb 28 2010,^[12] and the NCMA permanent collection, where "Theater of Oranges" has been added to the permanent collection of the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York.^[5] In 2007, Ana Maria's work was featured in the Latin Masters exhibition of the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, alongside other world-renowned artists such as Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero.

Ana Maria's artwork has also been displayed in University exhibits such as "Exhibition: 'Latin American Modern Masters'" in the University of Pennsylvania,^[3][13] and some of her artwork has been reproduced by UNICEF. Her artwork has been present in various exhibitions in American (Latin America, USA, and Canada) and European cities. Additionally, the Government of Japan acquired two of her paintings, and in 1986, by invitation of the Government of Italy, Ana Maria participated in the Festival "Dei Due Mondi" that takes place every year in the city of Spoleto, Italy.^[11]

Death[]

Martínez died on December 16, 2012 at San Salvador, El Salvador.^[1]

References[]

External links[]

• Official website