An artist is born

On May 28, 1937, Ana María Avilés came to the world in Santa Ana, a cheerful provincial city in El Salvador, invaded by the soft smells of homemade candy and by roasted coffee in the heat of the sun that adorned the surrounding hills like blankets of soft sepia color. From the colloquial Santa Ana, in 1943, the Avilés family moved to the Capital, San Salvador. Ana María with them, they leave their native land, but the memories of an idyllic landscape will remain in their memory. Ana María took basic and higher studies and at the age of twenty-two, in 1959, she married Oswaldo Martínez, an architect with restless sensitivity and a profound love of art. She begins to be called Ana María Martínez.

Along with the growth of her family, there was a parallel growth in her interest in fine arts that she demonstrated from childhood. From conscientious contemplation and theoretical study of those books that came into her hands, she learned to take on the plastic space, the color and the beautiful forms of nature, as part of her knowledge. A deep religious feeling and a vocation to art already completely exposed, propitiate the path that leads her to the workshop of a French sculptor who visited San Salvador and who invites her to modeling classes. The ancient clay, traditional material of the Central American ancestral cultures, as if in a magical act, arouse in her a special interest in pre-Columbian art that leads her to visit archaeological sites in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Belize.

Moved by Mayan art and culture, she 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.

Her trajectory

The years pass and 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 .”

Conclusion

For Ana María Martínez, oranges are oranges, a bunch of grapes is a bunch of grapes, but within the contemplation of the world with its turbulence and opulence, as she herself says, it is "a theater and we: actors and spectators". Her style is personal. It is her feeling of life and art in a sometimes metaphysical relationship. The viewer will see there what their feelings and affections generate for them. Perhaps a state of mind, perhaps an erotic charge that concerns the sensuality of the round shape and its velvety textures, as Mallarmé would say "art is not in the painting of the object itself, but in the effect it produces" .

The work done in the final stages of her art shows a confident artist, although she proclaims that she wants to give more. Dedicated full-time to her work, she produced series of still lifes that cry out for a new classification for departing from the conventions that they have involved in historical and artistic practice. The theme is practically one, the fruit in its various species, oranges, grapes, apples, solitary or together, hang on the canvas as if wanting to detach and approach the viewer in a state of delight. But it is not the fruit form or the fruit itself, it is the painting that speaks for itself. Hyper-realism is discussed in this latest series. It could be so, but “for me fruits are my characters, it is part of my life. I do not feel them as such, I do not see that an orange is broken. I see that the person is broken. My oranges are not the same. I like to play with the light.” Something that is important in the work of this Salvadoran artist is the impeccability of her drawing. With the themes in her imagination, as part of a dream to follow, through austerity and work, is the blank canvas presented before her.

Painting with discipline, looking for light in the dark, catching the wonder of color, becomes the fiction of creating and inventing a reality from the context that surrounds it. Each shape and each color in its own space and inescapable by the artist's decision, make Ana María Martínez's artwork a result of the taste of the time.

Ana María dies on December 17, 2012 in the company of her husband of 54 years, their three children and five grandchildren.