Ana María de Martínez (nee Avilez) (May 28, 1937 - December 16, 2012) was a Salvadorian artist. She is best known for creating acrylic paintings on canvas. Martinez was a self-taught painter, and her career expanded to almost four decades. 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. In 1959, at the age of twenty-two, she married Oswaldo Martínez, an architect. A deep religious feeling and a vocation to art led her to the workshop of a French sculptor visiting San Salvador, who invited her to take modelling classes. The use of clay, the traditional material of the Central American ancestral cultures, aroused her interest in pre-Columbian art, leading her to visit archaeological sites in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Belize. Moved by Mayan art and culture, Martínez established a dialogue with her ancestors, thus discovering her means of expression and using 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. Martinez, later on, moved towards folkloric themes, reflecting the cottage-core aesthetic in a style of marked naif accent. Six of her paintings were auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. From 1983 to 1984, symbolic characters, walls and insects (like the honeybee) grabbed her attention due to their industriousness and order, creating still lives. From 1985 to 1989, she moved within a thematic romanticism of a strange nature. She mixed elements of considerable realism with dreamlike elements, taken from fantasies. She received an invitation from the Italian government to participate in the Spoletto Art Festival "Dei Due Mondi" in 1986. The success was immediate. Martínez said, "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". Martínez also illustrated Salvadorian poet Claudia Lars's book “Tierra de Infancia”. After 1989, Martinez entered another artistic stage, which she herself called "Theaters." During this stage, she combined the theme, definitely in the line of the still life, with the refined technique