Her first experiences were drawings of perspectives on the presentation of architectural projects. In 1967 and 1968, she participated in a clay modeling workshop, sponsored by the French embassy in San Salvador, where she discovered a procedure for making dry-cast concrete molds and polychrome pourings using many techniques including the encaustic technique, which she would later use in her painting, combined with other mediums (1969-1973).

Ancient clay, traditional material of Central American ancestral cultures, as in a magical act, arouses in her a special interest in pre-Columbian art that leads her to visit archaeological sites in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Belize.

Deeply moved by pre-Columbian art, she studied Mayan paintings since 1974 and, to strengthen links to that fascinating past, decides to paint, with acrylic colors on canvases, her own ideas about that world.

A pictorial work anchored in these links with the past and translated into forty-four works of art with Mayan themes, at the age of thirty-nine she mounted her first solo exhibition, at the Art Gallery Atlacatl, in San Salvador in 1977, an event that was a complete success.

And so she began her fruitful journey in the plastic arts. Ana María de Martínez, the artist, was born.